Size illusion
Inside the question engineOpen the field notes
Country pairs are matched by real surface area. Outlines are fitted into similar frames, so the drawing size does not reveal the answer.
About the quiz: Size illusion
This quiz tests whether you can judge the true size of countries without help from the map. Every outline is fitted into a frame of similar size, so the drawing does not give the answer away. What counts is your sense of real area, which the Mercator map often distorts.
How are the questions built?
Each round has 10 questions. Pairs are drawn from 199 countries and territories that have verified data and an outline on the map. The area gap between the answers shrinks at each stage: from 50% to 150% in the first questions to only 2% to 8% in the last ones.
Where does the data come from?
Total area comes from the World Bank (FAO data) and the UN Demographic Yearbook 2024. Country outlines come from Natural Earth data at a 1:50m scale.
A fact from the data
The Democratic Republic of the Congo covers 2,345,410 km² and Greenland 2,166,086 km². Congo is therefore larger, yet on a Mercator map Greenland looks about 11 times larger.