Q 01/05

Lake Superior drains east into which of the other Great Lakes?

A) Erie

B) Michigan

C) Ontario

D) Huron

Answer · why

D) Huron

The water then works its way through the lower lakes to the St. Lawrence and the Atlantic. Superior sits highest of the five, which is where its Frenc...

Q 02/05

Lake Superior is the world's largest freshwater lake by surface area. By volume, where does it rank?

A) First

B) Second

C) Third

D) Fifth

Answer · why

C) Third

Only two lakes hold more fresh water, both of them far deeper rift lakes. The Caspian Sea beats it on both counts but is brackish, so it does not qual...

Q 03/05

Which two lakes hold more fresh water than Lake Superior?

A) Baikal and Tanganyika

B) Victoria and Titicaca

C) Victoria and Baikal

D) Tanganyika and Malawi

Answer · why

A) Baikal and Tanganyika

Both are ancient rift-valley lakes more than a kilometre deep. Superior is huge but relatively shallow for its size, averaging under 500 feet.

Q 04/05

The Ojibwe name for the lake, gichi-gami, which Longfellow wrote as 'Gitche Gumee', means what?

A) Shining water

B) Great sea

C) Cold water

D) Long shore

Answer · why

B) Great sea

Father Frederic Baraga's 1853 dictionary, the first for the Ojibwe language, recorded it as Otchipwe-kitchi-gami. Gordon Lightfoot borrowed the same s...

Q 05/05

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow set which poem 'by the shining Big-Sea-Water' of Gitche Gumee?

A) Evangeline

B) The Courtship of Miles Standish

C) Paul Revere's Ride

D) The Song of Hiawatha

Answer · why

D) The Song of Hiawatha

Longfellow never saw the lake; he built the poem largely from Henry Schoolcraft's writings on Ojibwe legends. Its galloping trochaic metre was borrowe...