Latitude and Longitude Trivia
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98 free Latitude and Longitude trivia questions with answers — geography quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Latitude was easy: sailors could read it off the noon Sun or the Pole Star for centuries. Longitude nearly drove Europe's navies mad. Because the Earth turns 15 degrees an hour, finding your east-west position means knowing the time somewhere else, and until a Yorkshire carpenter named John Harrison built a clock that kept time at sea, ships guessed — sometimes fatally. Parliament put up £20,000 for a solution in 1714, and the rest of the world only agreed where zero degrees should be at a conference in Washington in 1884. These 98 questions cover the whole grid: parallels and meridians, the five named circles of latitude and why they drift, the Equator's eleven countries and its 40,075-kilometre waistline, Greenwich and the GPS meridian 102 metres to its east, the International Date Line's zigzags around Kiribati and Samoa, Hipparchus and Ptolemy, Galileo's moons of Jupiter, Harrison's H4, Null Island, and why Mars has a better prime meridian than we do. Easy questions stick to which line runs which way; the expert tier asks about arcseconds, the Tordesillas line and the day the Philippines skipped. Every answer is cited to a page we checked, with a short explanation so you learn something even when you miss.
30 of 98 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Sailing-ship crews dreaded which belt close to the Equator?
The Doldrums
The Doldrums. Ships were often becalmed there; 'in the doldrums' first meant low spirits, and the phrase was apparently later taken for the name of the place.
Q 02Lines of constant latitude are known as what?
Parallels
Parallels. Unlike meridians, which all meet at the poles, these circles never touch: each stays the same distance from its neighbours all the way round the globe.
Q 03Much of the border between which two countries runs along latitude 49° north?
Canada and the US
Canada and the US. An 1818 treaty ran the border west along it to the Rockies, and in 1846 the two sides extended the same line to the Pacific as a compromise, despite the cry of 'Fifty-four forty or fight'.
Q 04Because Earth bulges at the Equator, the summit of which mountain is the farthest point from Earth's centre?
Chimborazo
Chimborazo. The Ecuadorian volcano stands one degree south of the Equator, so although Everest is more than 2,500 m taller above sea level, Everest's peak sits about 2 km closer to Earth's centre.
Q 05The 'm' in a.m. and p.m. stands for meridiem, the Latin for which time of day?
Noon
Noon. A meridian is literally a midday line: the Sun crosses yours at local noon, which is how the north-south lines of longitude came by the name.
Q 06What is the latitude of the North Pole?
90° N
90° N. Every meridian meets there, so the Pole has no longitude of its own, and whichever way you step from it you are heading south.
Q 07A one-hour difference in local solar time corresponds to what span of longitude?
15°
15°. Earth turns through 360° every 24 hours, which is why a clock still keeping home time shows a navigator how far east or west the ship has sailed.
Q 08What do geographers call the point on Earth's surface diametrically opposite your own position?
The antipode
The antipode. The word is Greek for 'with feet opposite (ours)', and it is why the British came to call Australia and New Zealand the Antipodes.
Q 09In which city was the 1884 International Meridian Conference held?
Washington, D.C.
Washington, D.C. The delegates backed Greenwich with only one vote against, largely because nearly two-thirds of the world's ships already used charts based on it.
Q 10Which mountain, only about 330 km from the Equator, still carries glaciers on its summit?
Kilimanjaro
Kilimanjaro. At 5,895 metres its summit stays cold enough for ice at a latitude where the lowlands are hot all year: climate follows altitude as well as latitude.
Q 11GPS puts 0° longitude not on Greenwich's famous courtyard line but roughly what distance to its east?
100 metres
100 metres. The modern line runs about 102 m east of the old one because satellites measure from Earth's centre of mass, while the Greenwich telescope was levelled by local gravity.
Q 12Legend says ships becalmed around 30° north threw which animals overboard, giving those latitudes their name?
Horses
Horses. In the calm, dry 'horse latitudes' stalled crews ran short of water and are said to have sacrificed their cargo of horses to save it, one of several stories told to explain the name.
Q 13Which country abstained from the 1884 vote for Greenwich and kept its own time until 1911?
France
Q 21Why do rockets launched eastward from sites near the Equator, such as Kourou, need less fuel?
Earth spins fastest there
Earth spins fastest there. The ground moves east at about 460 metres a second, a free push for any rocket, which is why the US launches from Florida and Europe from French Guiana.
Q 22The prime meridian leaves Europe from the coast of which country?
Spain
Spain. The line crosses the Pyrenees, cuts across the Gulf of Valencia and leaves the coast for good near Calp, so a slice of eastern Spain lies in the Eastern Hemisphere and the rest in the Western.
Q 23At roughly what latitude does the Tropic of Cancer lie?
23.4° N
France. Even when it switched in 1911, the law avoided the word Greenwich, defining the new time as Paris mean time retarded by 9 minutes and 21 seconds.
Q 14Which ancient geographer's world map measured longitude from a prime meridian through the 'Fortunate Isles'?
Ptolemy
Ptolemy. He set zero in the Atlantic, at the western edge of the world he knew, so that every place on his map lay to the east of it.
Q 15Who is generally credited with inventing the geographic coordinate system?
Eratosthenes
Eratosthenes. The Alexandrian librarian who coined the word 'geography' also worked out Earth's circumference from the shadows cast at two Egyptian cities.
Q 16Which continent is crossed by the Equator, the Tropic of Cancer and the Tropic of Capricorn?
Africa
Africa. The prime meridian crosses it too, so the continent has land in all four hemispheres, with about two-thirds of it lying north of the Equator.
Q 17What is the approximate length of the Equator?
40,000 km
40,000 km. The round figure is no accident: the metre was first defined in the 1790s as one ten-millionth of the distance from the North Pole to the Equator.
Q 18Despite its name, Equatorial Guinea misses the Equator; which nearby country does the line cross?
Gabon
Gabon. Equatorial Guinea's mainland sits just north of the line and its island of Annobón lies south of it, so the Equator slips between them without touching either.
Q 19Counting land and sea together, which country straddles the greatest length of the Equator?
Indonesia
Indonesia. The line threads Sumatra, Borneo, Sulawesi and Halmahera and the seas between them, and on Borneo it runs through the city of Pontianak, which marks it with a monument.
Q 20The Equator is the only line of latitude that is also what?
A great circle
A great circle. Its plane cuts Earth into two equal halves, and because great circles are the shortest routes on a globe, pilots plot their courses along them rather than along lines of latitude.
23.4° N. The figure is simply the tilt of Earth's axis, which makes this the farthest north that the midday Sun can ever stand directly overhead.
Q 24On which date is the Sun directly overhead at the Tropic of Capricorn?
The December solstice
The December solstice. Earth's southern half is then tilted most fully towards the Sun, so a flagpole on the tropic briefly casts no shadow, at the height of the southern summer.
Q 25The Tropic of Cancer is the southern limit of which alliance's mutual-defence obligation?
NATO
NATO. Its treaty covers members' islands only in the North Atlantic north of that line, which is why an attack on Hawaii would not oblige the other allies to respond.
Q 26North of which line does the midnight sun shine each summer?
Arctic Circle
Arctic Circle. On the line itself the Sun stays up for one full day; farther north the unbroken daylight lasts longer, until at the Pole the Sun stays up for about six months.
Q 27At about what rate is the Arctic Circle drifting towards the North Pole in the 21st century?
14.5 metres per year
14.5 metres per year. Iceland's island of Grímsey marks the line with an eight-tonne stone sphere, which has to be moved to a new spot as the circle creeps north.
Q 28The word 'arctic' comes from the Greek name of which animal, after a constellation of the northern sky?
Bear
Bear. Greek arktos is the bear of Ursa Major, which circles the northern sky, so the Arctic is the region under the Bear and 'antarctic' simply means opposite to it.
Q 29Which king tested a longitude sea clock at his own observatory and pressed Parliament to pay its maker?
George III
George III. After ten weeks of daily checks in 1772 he found it accurate to within a third of a second a day, and told its maker to petition Parliament for his reward.
Q 30Which unit of distance was originally defined as one minute of latitude?
The nautical mile
The nautical mile. A degree of latitude is therefore 60 of them, about 111 km, which lets navigators measure distance straight off the latitude scale at the edge of a chart.