Q 01/05

As of 2025, roughly how many people lived in the Greater Cairo metropolitan area?

A) 2 million

B) 7 million

C) 22 million

D) 70 million

Answer · why

C) 22 million

22 million. Fewer than half of them live in Cairo itself: the built-up area long ago jumped the Nile and now spreads across three governorates.

Q 02/05

Cairo's Arabic name, al-Qāhirah, means what?

A) The Radiant

B) The Vanquisher

C) The Mother of Cities

D) The Gate of the Nile

Answer · why

B) The Vanquisher

The Vanquisher, also rendered 'the Victorious'. In one telling the name was chosen because Mars, called 'the Conquering Star' in Arabic, was rising as...

Q 03/05

Egyptians often refer to Cairo by which name, which is also the Egyptian Arabic word for Egypt itself?

A) Iskandariya

B) Kemet

C) Maṣr

D) Qahira

Answer · why

C) Maṣr

Maṣr. The name belonged to the town on this site before Cairo existed, so the quarter the capital grew from is still called Maṣr al-Qadima, 'Old Maṣr'...

Q 04/05

Cairo was founded in 969 by which dynasty as its new capital?

A) The Abbasids

B) The Mamluks

C) The Ayyubids

D) The Fatimids

Answer · why

D) The Fatimids

The Fatimids. Their Cairo was a royal enclosure closed to ordinary people, housing only the caliph's court, officials and troops, so Egyptians went on...

Q 05/05

Which novelist's Cairo Trilogy helped make him the first Arab winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature?

A) Orhan Pamuk

B) Naguib Mahfouz

C) Wole Soyinka

D) Kahlil Gibran

Answer · why

B) Naguib Mahfouz

Naguib Mahfouz. In 1994 an extremist angered by one of his novels stabbed him in the neck outside his Cairo home; he survived, but nerve damage limite...