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Can you locate all 23 provinces of Argentina, and its capital city?
Can you locate all 10 provinces and 3 territories of Canada?
Can you locate all 47 prefectures of Japan?
Can you locate all 22 provinces, 5 autonomous regions and 4 municipalities of China?
The fifty states are the first thing most people think they know about the United States and the last thing they can draw. The shapes are familiar and the positions are not: the rectangles of the Mountain West look interchangeable, the north east is a pile of small states with long names, and a surprising number of players put Kentucky where Tennessee is. This page is the states and the District of Columbia, the four Census regions they are grouped into, and what separates the pairs that get confused.
The map is the fifty states and the District of Columbia, which is the federal capital district and is not part of any state. The territories (Puerto Rico, Guam and the rest) are not states and are not here. Alaska and Hawaii are moved into the empty space below the south west and drawn smaller than life, behind a dashed line, which is the usual way of fitting the whole country on one screen. Alaska is really more than twice the size of Texas, and Hawaii sits some four thousand kilometres west of California.
Below a state sit the counties (Louisiana calls them parishes and Alaska boroughs), of which there are about three thousand. A state is the tier that sets the traffic law, issues the number plate and owns the highways, which is why it is the tier a photograph points at.
The traps are the neighbours that look alike.
Dakotas. North Dakota is the upper one and South Dakota the lower, and the Black Hills and Mount Rushmore are South Dakota.
Kentucky and Tennessee. Tennessee is the long thin one that touches eight states, and Kentucky sits above it with a western tail along the Mississippi.
Virginia and West Virginia. West Virginia broke away in 1863 and is the mountainous one with the panhandles. Virginia is the bigger one that holds the Chesapeake coast.
The Four Corners. Utah, Colorado, Arizona and New Mexico are the only four states that meet at a single point, and Colorado and Wyoming are the two that are almost perfect rectangles.
These four are the Census Bureau's regions, the cut the federal government publishes its statistics in and the one most Americans will recognise: the North East, the Midwest, the South and the West. They are the same four the plates and area code games use, so a player who learns one of them learns the others. The District of Columbia is filed under the South, and each region can be switched on and off on its own in the game's start dialog.
The smallest state, under three thousand square kilometres, tucked between Connecticut and Massachusetts with Narragansett Bay cut into it. It has a tap area on this map for exactly that reason. Its nickname is the Ocean State, and its coast is the clue: a sandy New England shore south of Boston and east of New London is this one.
An odd shape with a panhandle at each end, because it was drawn along the mountain counties that stayed loyal to the Union and split from Virginia in 1863. Everything inside it is Appalachian: steep forested ridges, coal towns, narrow valleys and almost no flat ground. Neighbouring Virginia has the coastal plain and the capital's suburbs, so flat land and sprawl mean you left.
Wyoming and Colorado are the two states drawn entirely from straight lines. Wyoming is the empty one, with the smallest population in the country, big sky, sagebrush, Yellowstone in the north west corner and the Tetons below it. Colorado below it has the high Rockies and a lot more people along the Front Range.
Fifty. The last two to join were Alaska and Hawaii, in 1959. The District of Columbia is the capital district and is not a state, which is why this quiz has fifty-one regions to place.
Because placed where they really are they would stretch the map across the Pacific and shrink the other forty-eight states to a strip. Both are moved into the empty corner below the south west, Alaska is drawn at well under its real size, and a dashed line separates them from the mainland.
The North East, the Midwest, the South and the West, as defined by the Census Bureau. The Census Bureau also splits each region into divisions, nine in all, and that is the tier below. The regions are the standard way federal statistics are broken down.
Alaska is the largest by a wide margin, and Rhode Island the smallest. Texas is the largest of the forty-eight mainland states. By population California is the largest and Wyoming the smallest.
The Dakotas, Kentucky and Tennessee, Virginia and West Virginia, and the rectangles of the Mountain West: Wyoming, Colorado and Utah. In the north east, New Hampshire and Vermont are another pair that trips people up, since Vermont is the one on the New York side.
No. It is a federal district created from land given up by Maryland, it has no voting representation in the Senate and it belongs to no region in law. The Census Bureau counts it in the South, and this quiz does the same.
For the same country by other clues, try US License Plates and US Dialing Codes. For another federal country's first tier, Canada Provinces and Australia States are the closest.
