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

Huron. Nature no longer decides how much water makes the trip: gates across the lake's outlet let a joint US-Canadian board set Superior's outflow.

Q 02/05

Lake Superior is the largest freshwater lake by area, but which salty body of water is usually ranked the world's largest lake?

A) Caspian Sea

B) Aral Sea

C) Dead Sea

D) Salton Sea

Answer · why

A) Caspian Sea

The Caspian Sea. Whether it counts as a lake or a sea was argued over for decades by the five countries on its shores, because the answer decided how ...

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

Baikal and Tanganyika each cover well under half of Superior's area, but both fill rift valleys more than a kilometre deep, while Superior averages un...

Q 04/05

The Ojibwe name for Lake Superior, 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

Great sea. Longfellow glossed the name as 'Big-Sea-Water', and gichigami is still the everyday Ojibwe word for a sea or any large lake.

Q 05/05

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow set which poem 'by the shores 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

The Song of Hiawatha took its legends from Henry Schoolcraft's Ojibwe collections and its drumbeat metre from the Kalevala, a borrowing that brought a...