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us geography to foreigners


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I've always wondered how much US geography foreigners know. Like would you know that l.a. and SF are 400 miles apart or do some people think theyre close because theyre both in california (or not even know theyre in california). also generally where in the country most states are?

I know next to nothing about where anything in any other country is with the slight exception of Canada, but I don't know if people know more about the United states.

tell me!

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I'm sweet at geography.

I learned really young that no one in America knows American geography either. I was in Detroit for a hockey tournament wearing my Tonawanda Lightning stuff. Fair enough, people were like "oh, where's that?"

"It's a suburb of Buffalo."

*blank stare*

"..Buffalo, NY..."

"Oh! How often do you get to the city?"

"Um.. I mean, it's 10 seconds away...."

"I love Central Park, do you go there much?"

"Uh... Buffalo is the next biggest city in the state, and it's actually 7 hours away from NYC... have you seen a map before?"

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People love to poke fun at Americans for not knowing the geographical locations of other countries that well. You'll have people placing Egypt in Asia and India in the middle east and Portugal down South America way and shit like that.

But I wonder how well people know geography in other countries? Part of it owes to America being somewhat isolated. But I'm not sure how well people in Europe know South America, or so on.

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I Know California is pretty big and I know the big cities (LA - San Diego - San Franscisco - Long Beach - Riverside, San Jose, Fresno.. etc....), but I don't know if I could point WHERE the different cities are in California. When I was younger, I could name all the states and their capitals. I don't think I remember them all right now. But I'm sure I could point where every state is (approx.). I probably could point where every country (most) in the world is on a map.

I' canadian by the way

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when i say i'm from harrisburg most people have no idea where that is. i realize it's not a huge city compared to other major cities, but ITS THE CAPITAL OF THE STATE.

also, when my best friend (who is getting his phD from harvard, to put things in perspective) was purchasing plane tickets to visit our friends in berkeley, he almost bought tickets to LAX because he thought that was close to san francisco.

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Here's the middle east / northern Africa if you think you're a hotshot. It's humbling sometimes.

http://www.rethinkingschools.org/just_fun/games/mapgame.html

damn, Middle east I pretty much nailed, but the noncoastal african countries I bombed. Chalk it up to studying WWII history and terrorism now for knowing what I did know. That one was brutal.

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try this

http://www.addictinggames.com/50states.html

you have to drag them to the correct place

way harder than you would think

post your scores

score 92 - avg error 6miles - time 282 sec

score- 90.19. I wasn't paying attention, and put wyoming as CO. whoops.

avg error -14 miles

time - 262 seconds.

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I'm doing terribly on the Northern Africc/Middle East map. I either know right where a country is, or have no clue haha. I got 47/48 on the sates map because my computer was choppy.

As for the placement map (doing the first US map obviously helped a bit):

94.11% - 9 miles avg error - 385 secs - 48/51 perfect

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I'm pretty solid with my geographical skills, but I'm gonna try these tests and post the results.

EDIT: Got two wrong on the Middle East/Africa one (I accidentally dropped Chad where Niger was, and I put Uzbekistan where Turkmenistan was). Not bad though.

I got all 48, but I messed up a few because the cursor on the American states one isn't the easiest to use.

The other game I got a score of 96.07, average error of 2 miles, in 206 seconds. I misplaced DC since it was my first piece of the puzzle, and I knew where it approximately was, but I was off by enough it gave me a wrong answer. The other one was Nebraska, and it was my first mid-western state, so there were no other ones to build off. Pretty respectable if you ask me.

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Here's the middle east / northern Africa if you think you're a hotshot. It's humbling sometimes.

http://www.rethinkingschools.org/just_fun/games/mapgame.html

I got 10 countries in the middle east. I don't think that's too bad. It's pretty much all the countries that the US has conflict or relations with though.

Egypt is the only country I can place in northern Africa.

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