Eurasia
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50 free Eurasia trivia questions with answers — geography quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Eurasia is what you get when you stop treating Europe and Asia as separate pieces of land. Geologists see one continuous landmass, the largest on Earth and home to roughly seven in ten people, and the line drawn between its two halves is a matter of convention rather than coastline. This quiz covers the Eurasian continent from edge to edge: where its boundaries run and who decided them, its highest, lowest, coldest and farthest-flung places, the waterways and ranges that shape it, and the tectonic collisions that built it. It also follows the traders, conquerors, plagues and ideas that travelled its length, and meets some of the animals that carry its name. It is written for geography fans, students, teachers and quiz-night regulars. Every answer comes with a short explanation, so even a wrong guess leaves you knowing something new about the biggest stretch of land on the planet.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which 2,500 km mountain range in Russia is the conventional boundary between Europe and Asia?
Ural Mountains
The Ural Mountains make a low wall for a continental border: their highest peak, Mount Narodnaya, reaches only 1,895 metres.
Q 02Which landlocked country, the world's largest, moved its footballers from Asia's confederation to UEFA?
Kazakhstan
Kazakhstan lies mostly in Central Asia, but a slice of its territory extends into Eastern Europe, and its footballers have played in UEFA since 2002.
Q 03Which Siberian lake, the deepest in the world, holds more than a fifth of Earth's fresh surface water?
Baikal
Baikal is also the world's oldest lake, at 25 to 30 million years, and holds more water than all the North American Great Lakes combined.
Q 04Which empire became the largest contiguous empire in history, stretching from the Sea of Japan to Eastern Europe?
Mongol
The Mongol Empire grew from a council in 1206 that proclaimed Temüjin, better known as Genghis Khan, ruler of all the tribes he had united.
Q 05Which Eurasian bird of the crow family was the first non-mammal found to recognise itself in a mirror?
Magpie
The Eurasian magpie passed the mirror test in 2008, after researchers placed coloured stickers on five birds' throats where only a reflection could reveal them.
Q 06Which dystopian novel imagines a superstate called Eurasia locked in endless war with Oceania and Eastasia?
Nineteen Eighty-Four
Nineteen Eighty-Four has Oceania's enemy switch from Eurasia to Eastasia in the middle of Hate Week, and George Orwell's ruling Party simply rewrites the records.
Q 07Which Ice Age giant survived on Wrangel Island, off northern Eurasia, until about 4,000 years ago?
Woolly mammoth
The woolly mammoth vanished from mainland Siberia around 10,000 years ago, yet an isolated herd lasted another 6,000 years on this Arctic island.
Q 08Which salt lake bordering Jordan has the lowest shores on Earth, more than 400 metres below sea level?
Dead Sea
The Dead Sea is nearly ten times as salty as the ocean, which is why swimmers float on it and almost nothing lives in it.
Q 09Which strait runs through the middle of Istanbul, splitting the city between Europe and Asia?
Bosporus
The Bosporus is the world's narrowest strait used for international shipping, and three bridges now carry traffic between the two continents.
Q 10Which pandemic swept west across Eurasia in the 1340s and killed between 30% and 60% of Europe's population?
Black Death
The Black Death has been traced to graves near Lake Issyk-Kul in modern Kyrgyzstan, where the plague strain was the direct ancestor of the one that devastated Europe.
Q 11Which network of trade routes across Eurasia had its name popularised by a German geographer in 1877?
Silk Road
Silk Road translates the German Seidenstraße, a term popularised by Ferdinand von Richthofen after his seven expeditions to China.
Q 12Which body of water between Europe and Asia is the world's largest lake, despite being called a sea?
Caspian Sea
The Caspian Sea holds 40 to 44% of all the lake water in the world and covers an area larger than Germany.
Q 13Which stretch of water, about 82 km wide at its narrowest, separates Eurasia from North America?
Bering Strait
The Bering Strait holds two islands, Big Diomede in Russia and Little Diomede in the United States, that sit only 3.8 km apart.
Q 21Which river, the longest in Eurasia, flows for more than 6,000 km without leaving a single country?
Yangtze
The Yangtze drains one-fifth of China's land, and nearly a third of the country's people live in its basin.
Q 22Which river, the longest in Europe, is widely regarded as the national river of Russia?
Volga
The Volga never reaches an ocean, draining instead into a landlocked sea, and five of Russia's ten largest cities lie in its basin.
Q 23Which river passes through or along ten countries and four national capitals on its way to the Black Sea?
Danube
The Danube rises in Germany's Black Forest and passes Vienna, Bratislava, Budapest and Belgrade, more capitals than any other river in the world.
Q 14Which tectonic plate drifted north from Gondwana and crashed into Eurasia, pushing up the Himalayas?
Indian
The Indian plate moved north at about 20 cm a year after breaking away some 100 million years ago, and the crust folded in the crash became the world's highest range.
Q 15Which extinct humans, named after a German valley, lived across western Eurasia until about 40,000 years ago?
Neanderthals
Neanderthals never quite vanished: genome work in 2010 showed they interbred with modern humans, and people of non-African ancestry still carry traces of their DNA.
Q 16Which Pacific port is the eastern end of the Trans-Siberian Railway, more than 9,000 km by rail from Moscow?
Vladivostok
Vladivostok has been linked directly to Moscow since 1916 by the longest railway line in the world, a journey that crosses eight time zones.
Q 17Which dormant volcano in Russia's Caucasus, 5,642 metres high, is counted as the highest peak in Europe?
Mount Elbrus
Mount Elbrus is also the highest volcano in all of Eurasia, and each of its two summits is a dormant volcanic dome.
Q 18Which Italian merchant spent 17 years in Kublai Khan's China and later dictated his travels to a cellmate?
Marco Polo
Marco Polo reached home in Venice after 24 years away, and the book he dictated later inspired Christopher Columbus.
Q 19What name is given to the belt of grassland stretching 8,000 km across Eurasia from Manchuria to Hungary?
Steppe
The Steppe is open plain with no closed forest except near rivers and lakes, and Eurasia's belt of it is also known simply as the Great Steppe.
Q 20Which island sits astride the rift where the Eurasian and North American tectonic plates are pulling apart?
Iceland
Iceland's old parliament site, Thingvellir, lies in a rift valley that marks the crest of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge and the boundary between the two plates.
Q 24Which vast upland north of the Himalayas, averaging over 4,500 metres, is nicknamed the Roof of the World?
Tibetan Plateau
The Tibetan Plateau is also called the Third Pole, because its ice fields hold the largest reserve of fresh water outside the polar regions.
Q 25Which peninsula, the largest in the world, was formed when the Red Sea Rift tore it away from Africa?
Arabian
The Arabian Peninsula covers more than 3.2 million square km and makes up most of the land on its own tectonic plate.
Q 26Which artificial waterway, opened in 1869, cut through the only land bridge joining Africa to Eurasia?
Suez Canal
The Suez Canal took a decade to dig under a company formed by the French diplomat Ferdinand de Lesseps, and it runs 193 km at sea level.
Q 27Which channel at the mouth of the Mediterranean leaves just 14 km of water between Eurasia and Africa?
Strait of Gibraltar
The Strait of Gibraltar is flanked by heights that antiquity called the Pillars of Hercules, which gave the passage its Latin name, Fretum Herculeum.
Q 28Which animal, domesticated on the plains of western Eurasia around 2200 BCE, transformed travel and warfare?
Horse
The horse in every modern stable descends from that single domestication, genetic studies show, not from the older Central Asian herds once given the credit.
Q 29Which king, tutored by Aristotle, won an empire reaching from the Adriatic Sea to the Indus River?
Alexander the Great
Alexander the Great was undefeated in battle and founded more than twenty cities, the most prominent of them Alexandria in Egypt.
Q 30Which Central Asian salt lake, once among the world's four largest lakes, shrank to a tenth of its size by 2007?
Aral Sea
The Aral Sea dried up after Soviet irrigation projects diverted the rivers that fed it, and its eastern basin is now called the Aralkum Desert.