GIS (Geographic Information Systems)
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40 free GIS (Geographic Information Systems) trivia questions with answers — geography quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Every time a phone finds the nearest café, a city plans a bus route or a scientist tracks a flood, a geographic information system is doing the work. GIS is the technology that ties data to places, and it sits quietly behind most of the maps people use each day. This quiz covers the ideas every GIS course starts with, such as how digital maps store shapes and images, how coordinates pin down a location and how analysts measure distance. It also tells the stories behind the field: the pioneers who built the first systems, the satellites that photograph the planet, and the companies and volunteers who make today's map software. It suits geography and GIS students revising for a test, working analysts who want a quick challenge, and anyone curious about how modern maps are made. Every answer comes with a short explanation, so a wrong guess still teaches something.
30 of 40 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which physician mapped cholera deaths around London's Broad Street pump in 1854?
John Snow
John Snow marked each death on a street plan and the cluster pointed to one water pump. Parish officials removed its handle the day after he made his case.
Q 02Which name do GIS users give the spot at 0°N 0°E, where records with blank coordinates pile up?
Null Island
Null Island is no island at all: a weather buoy named Soul was moored at the spot. One public map dataset lists it as a one-metre-square island to trap errors.
Q 03Which virtual globe program began at Keyhole, a startup once funded by the CIA's venture arm?
Google Earth
Google Earth launched in 2005, the year after Google bought Keyhole. The startup's name lives on in KML, short for Keyhole Markup Language, the file format the program reads.
Q 04Which third-party US presidential candidate inspired Esri's founder to launch GIS Day in 1999?
Ralph Nader
Ralph Nader is the person Jack Dangermond credits with the idea behind the event. It is held each year on the third Wednesday of November.
Q 05Which 1569 world map design, drawn for sailors, makes Greenland look as big as Africa?
Mercator
Mercator stretches land more the farther it lies from the Equator, so Greenland matches Africa on paper although Africa is 14 times larger. Most web maps still use a version of the design.
Q 06Which US president had the deliberate error in civilian GPS signals switched off in May 2000?
Bill Clinton
Bill Clinton ended the policy called Selective Availability, giving civilians the accuracy the military had. Ronald Reagan had promised public access after a Korean airliner strayed into Soviet airspace in 1983.
Q 07Which country built the first working GIS in the 1960s to manage an inventory of its rural land?
Canada
Canada began the system in Ottawa in 1963 to hold maps of soils, farming, wildlife and forestry at a scale of 1:50,000. Its lead designer is remembered as the father of GIS.
Q 08Which US university built the map dashboard the world used to track COVID-19 from January 2020?
Johns Hopkins
Johns Hopkins engineer Lauren Gardner built it with a first-year graduate student, Ensheng Dong. The map went live on January 22, 2020 and has logged more than 200 billion data requests.
Q 09Which volunteer-built world map did Steve Coast start in 2004 because British map data was not free?
OpenStreetMap
OpenStreetMap began at University College London after the Ordnance Survey declined to release its data under a free licence. Volunteers started by mapping the United Kingdom.
Q 10Which London district's observatory meridian was voted the world's zero of longitude in 1884?
Greenwich
Greenwich won the vote at a conference in Washington, D.C., but France abstained and kept the Paris meridian on its own maps for decades.
Q 11Which curves on a topographic map join points of equal height and bunch together on steep slopes?
Contours
Contours each follow a single height, so tight spacing means a cliff and wide spacing a plain. Dutch engineer Nicholas Cruquius charted a riverbed the same way in the early 1700s.
Q 12Which word did a NASA lab engineer first publish in 1965 for each square of a space-probe image?
Pixel
Pixel blends 'pix' and 'element', and Frederic Billingsley printed it to describe scans from Moon and Mars probes. In GIS imagery every one stores a measured value, such as brightness.
Q 13In vector GIS data, which geometry type stores a lake or land parcel as a closed loop?
Polygon
Polygon outlines close back on themselves to enclose a two-dimensional region. The other basic shapes are points, each a single coordinate, and lines, an ordered list of coordinates.
Q 21Which GIS tool, a core function since the late 1970s, draws a zone of set distance around a feature?
Buffer
Buffer zones are probably the most used tool in proximity analysis. Around a single point the result is a disc whose radius is the chosen distance.
Q 22Which process, also run in 'reverse', turns a street address into map coordinates?
Geocoding
Geocoding matches text against stored address points, street networks and postal boundaries. The reverse kind starts from a latitude and longitude and returns the name of the place.
Q 23Which map type, first drawn in 1826 to show schooling in France, shades each area by a statistic?
Choropleth
Choropleth maps got their name in 1938 from the geographer J. K. Wright. Baron Charles Dupin had drawn the earliest known example more than a century before.
Q 14Which map style, common in crime analysis, colours an area by how densely data points cluster?
Heat map
Heat map shading is an old idea: in 1873 Toussaint Loua hand-coloured a grid of social statistics for the districts of Paris.
Q 15Which satellite navigation system did the European Union build under civilian control to rival GPS?
Galileo
Galileo is named after the Italian astronomer Galileo Galilei. Europe wanted a positioning service that no foreign military could degrade or switch off.
Q 16Which ranging technology, built into iPhone Pro models, do survey aircraft use to map terrain?
Lidar
Lidar times laser pulses as they bounce back from a surface. The public first saw its precision in 1971, when Apollo 15 astronauts used a laser altimeter to chart the Moon.
Q 17Which US agency built the TIGER digital street map of the whole country, first used in 1990?
Census Bureau
The Census Bureau made TIGER the first nationwide digital map of roads, boundaries and water. It still publishes the files, which also record city limits, rivers and lakes.
Q 18Which path, the Equator being one example, is the shortest route between two points on a globe?
Great circle
Great circle routes cut the globe into two hemispheres, and any meridian joined to its opposite forms one too. Ships and aircraft follow them to cover the least distance.
Q 19Which technique triggers an alert when a phone or vehicle crosses a virtual boundary drawn on a map?
Geofencing
Geofencing draws a virtual perimeter around a real place and reports when a tracked device enters or leaves it. Rangers use it to learn when wildlife strays into farmland.
Q 20Which GIS data model, named from the Latin for a rake, stores the world as a grid of cells?
Raster
Raster reached English through German from rastrum, a rake. Satellite photos and scanned maps arrive in this form, with one measured value stored in every cell.
Q 24Which commercial GIS software from Esri began in 1982 as a command-line program?
ArcGIS
ArcGIS started out as ARC/INFO, driven by typed commands, and its ArcMap desktop program for Windows arrived in late 1999. Its maker, Esri, held an estimated 43% of the GIS software market in 2015.
Q 25Which free, open-source desktop GIS did Gary Sherman begin developing in early 2002?
QGIS
QGIS was called Quantum GIS until version 2.0 in 2013 settled on the short form. It became an incubator project of the Open Source Geospatial Foundation in 2007.
Q 26Which Esri map data format from the early 1990s needs at least three separate files to work?
Shapefile
Shapefile data borrows its .dbf table from the old DOS database program dBase. By the late 1990s it had become the geospatial industry's most popular format for sharing data.
Q 27Which former Royal Air Force pilot is known as the father of GIS, having coined the term itself?
Roger Tomlinson
Roger Tomlinson flew for the RAF from 1951 to 1954 and later ran computer mapping at an aerial survey company in Ottawa. There he saw that computers could handle mapping jobs too detailed for people.
Q 28Which satellite programme, begun in 1972, is the longest-running source of Earth imagery?
Landsat
Landsat began as the Earth Resources Technology Satellite, launched on 23 July 1972. Its unbroken record lets analysts compare the same place across five decades.
Q 29Which GIS record, standardised as ISO 19115, describes a dataset's quality, extent and lineage?
Metadata
Metadata means data about data, and libraries kept it on catalogue cards long before computers. US federal agencies drew up their own geospatial standard for it between 1992 and 1994.
Q 30Which band of light, strongly reflected by healthy leaves, is compared with red to map vegetation?
Near-infrared
Near-infrared light bounces off the cell structure of leaves, while the pigment chlorophyll soaks up visible light for photosynthesis. The contrast between the two is the basis of the NDVI plant index.