North America Trivia
0Loading crowd target
0Loading crowd target
7correct to beat the crowd
99 free North America trivia questions with answers — geography quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
48 free North America trivia questions with answers. North America runs from Kaffeklubben Island, the northernmost land on Earth, to the roadless jungle of the Darién Gap, and this quiz covers the whole continent rather than just the United States. There are questions on the big geography (Denali, the Great Lakes, the Mississippi and Missouri, Death Valley, the Bering Strait), on Canada, Mexico, Greenland, Central America and the Caribbean, and on the history that shaped the map: the Norse in Vinland, Cortés and the Aztecs, Jamestown and Quebec, the Louisiana Purchase, the Alaska sale and the Panama Canal. Easy questions ask which explorer the Americas are named after and which country Greenland belongs to. The hard ones want the lake the Panama Canal locks lift ships into, the island Canada and Denmark argued over for fifty years, the volcano under Crater Lake and what a 1553 map called the continent. It suits a geography classroom, a pub-quiz round or anyone planning a road trip that crosses a border. Every answer was checked against encyclopaedia entries on the continent, its countries and its landmarks, and each question shows the sentence that backs it up.
30 of 99 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which two continents are larger than North America by area?
Asia and Africa
Asia and Africa: Mercator world maps make Greenland look almost as big as Africa, though Africa is about 14 times larger.
Q 02The Americas were named after which explorer?
Amerigo Vespucci
Amerigo Vespucci: Martin Waldseemüller's 1507 map gave his first name a feminine Latin form, 'America', to match Europa and Asia, and placed it on South America.
Q 03Early European maps called part of North America 'Bacalaos', meaning the land of which fish?
Cod
The name nodded to the huge cod stocks off the East Coast that drew European fishing fleets to Newfoundland.
Q 04What is the highest peak in North America?
Denali
Denali: in 1910 two climbers planted a pole on its lower North Peak to prove a doubted ascent, and the 1913 first-ascent team reported spotting it through field glasses.
Q 05In 1896 a gold prospector renamed North America's highest peak after which presidential candidate?
William McKinley
William McKinley: prospector William Dickey reportedly picked him to spite silver-standard miners he had met; the federal name was dropped in 2015 and restored in 2025.
Q 06Which huge Canadian bay is named after an English explorer whose mutinous crew set him adrift in 1611?
Hudson Bay
Hudson Bay: the mutineers cast Henry Hudson, his teenage son John and seven sick or loyal crewmen adrift in a small boat, and Europeans never saw them again.
Q 07Which is the largest of the five Great Lakes by surface area?
Superior
Superior: its Ojibwe name gichi-gami, 'great sea', became 'Gitche Gumee' in Longfellow's The Song of Hiawatha, set on its south shore.
Q 08Which two Great Lakes are hydrologically one body of water, joined at the Straits of Mackinac?
Michigan and Huron
Michigan and Huron: the Straits of Mackinac are so wide and deep that both lakes sit at the same surface level, so hydrologists study them as one lake.
Q 09Roughly what share of the world's surface fresh water do the Great Lakes hold?
20%
20%: Siberia's Lake Baikal alone holds slightly more fresh surface water than all five Great Lakes combined.
Q 10The Mississippi River rises in which Minnesota lake?
Itasca
Itasca: Henry Schoolcraft coined the name from the Latin veritas caput, 'true head', and visitors can walk across the young Mississippi there on stones.
Q 11Which tributary is longer than the river it joins, making it the longest river in the United States?
Missouri
Missouri: Lewis and Clark set off up it in 1804 hoping for a water route across the continent, but found none and crossed the Rockies overland.
Q 12The Rio Grande, which forms much of the US-Mexico border, is known by what name in Mexico?
Río Bravo
Río Bravo: floods in the 1860s shifted its course south, leaving a strip of land called the Chamizal in dispute for about a century, until a 1963 treaty settled it.
Q 13The hottest air temperature ever officially recorded on Earth was measured in which California valley?
Death Valley
Q 21Which Spanish explorer named La Florida in 1513?
Juan Ponce de León
Juan Ponce de León: he is thought to have named it for its greenery or for Pascua Florida, the Easter season, and the Fountain of Youth story was attached to him only after he died.
Q 22In the Norse sagas, which North American land lay farthest south?
Vinland
Vinland: butternuts found at L'Anse aux Meadows don't grow north of New Brunswick, so the Norse reached lands where wild grapes grow, though 'vin' may mean meadow.
Q 23Which Norse explorer is thought to be the first European to land on mainland North America?
Leif Erikson
Death Valley: rising hot air is trapped by its steep mountain walls and recycled back to the floor. Some meteorologists dispute its 134 °F reading from 1913, though as of 2025 it stood as the official world record.
Q 14Greenland, the world's largest island, is an autonomous territory of which kingdom?
Denmark
Denmark: after a 1982 referendum, Greenland left the European Communities in 1985, while Denmark itself stayed in.
Q 15Greenland shares a short land border with Canada on which tiny island, disputed until 2022?
Hans
Hans: for decades each side's visitors swapped the other's flag for their own and left a bottle of liquor, until a June 2022 treaty split the island along a gorge.
Q 16What is the capital of Greenland?
Nuuk
Nuuk: until its longer runway opened on 28 November 2024, jets from abroad landed at Kangerlussuaq in the north, and travellers changed planes there.
Q 17What is Canada's newest territory, carved out of the Northwest Territories in 1999 for Inuit self-government?
Nunavut
Nunavut: with no political parties, its legislature elects the premier and cabinet from among its own members, and in Inuktitut the name means 'our land'.
Q 18Which is North America's most populous city?
Mexico City
Mexico City: it sits on the drained bed of Lake Texcoco, and pumping its aquifer has made parts of the city sink by metres over the last century.
Q 19Which active Mexican volcano's Nahuatl name means 'smoking mountain'?
Popocatépetl
Popocatépetl: it reawakened with a burst of gas and ash in December 1994, and in July 2013 its eruptions led US airlines to cancel more than 40 flights.
Q 20The Aztec Empire, whose capital was Tenochtitlan, was conquered in 1521 by which Spaniard?
Hernán Cortés
Hernán Cortés: to eliminate any thought of retreat, he had his ships scuttled, not burned as the legend has it.
Leif Erikson: in the Saga of the Greenlanders, he bought the ship of Bjarni Herjólfsson, who had sighted new lands but never landed, and hired a crew of 35.
Q 24What was the first permanent English settlement in North America, founded in 1607?
Jamestown
Jamestown: only about 60 settlers survived the Starving Time of 1609–10, yet John Rolfe's sweeter tobacco later turned Virginia into a profitable venture.
Q 25Which settlement did French explorer Samuel de Champlain found in 1608?
Quebec City
Quebec City: its name is thought to come from Kébec, an Algonquian word for 'where the river narrows', as the St. Lawrence does at the headland where the city stands.
Q 26Which leader sold the Louisiana Territory to the United States in 1803?
Napoleon Bonaparte
Napoleon Bonaparte: with his army in Saint-Domingue wrecked by yellow fever and war with Britain looming, he sold the whole territory for $15 million.
Q 27From which country did the United States buy Alaska in 1867?
Russia
Russia: skeptics mocked the $7.2 million deal as 'Seward's Folly', but an 1896 gold strike in the Yukon later made Alaska the gateway to the Klondike.
Q 28Panama separated from which country in 1903, with US backing, clearing the way for the canal?
Colombia
Colombia: its congress rejected a US canal treaty, so Roosevelt sent warships to Colón and Panama City to back Panama's November 1903 revolt.
Q 29Which country began building the Panama Canal in the 1880s before abandoning the effort in 1889?
France
France: Ferdinand de Lesseps, builder of the Suez Canal, led the effort, but yellow fever and malaria killed thousands of workers and the company went bankrupt.
Q 30The Panama Canal's locks lift ships 26 metres up to which artificial body of water?
Gatun Lake
Gatun Lake: when the Chagres River was dammed in 1913, rising water drowned the forest and left hilltops as islands, including Barro Colorado, now a Smithsonian research station.