Getting your questions ready
Getting your questions ready
Beat the crowd
10 questions No timer
50 free Latitude and Longitude trivia questions with answers — geography quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
Latitude was easy: sailors could read it off the noon Sun or the Pole Star for centuries. Longitude nearly drove Europe's navies mad. Because the Earth turns 15 degrees an hour, finding your east-west position means knowing the time somewhere else, and until a Yorkshire carpenter named John Harrison built a clock that kept time at sea, ships guessed — sometimes fatally. Parliament put up £20,000 for a solution in 1714, and the rest of the world only agreed where zero degrees should be at a conference in Washington in 1884. These 50 questions cover the whole grid: parallels and meridians, the five named circles of latitude and why they drift, the Equator's eleven countries and its 40,075-kilometre waistline, Greenwich and the GPS meridian 102 metres to its east, the International Date Line's zigzags around Kiribati and Samoa, Hipparchus and Ptolemy, Galileo's moons of Jupiter, Harrison's H4, Null Island, and why Mars has a better prime meridian than we do. Easy questions stick to which line runs which way; the expert tier asks about arcseconds, the Tordesillas line and the day the Philippines skipped. Every answer is cited to a page we checked, with a short explanation so you learn something even when you miss.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which coordinate specifies a point's north–south position on Earth?
Latitude
It runs from −90° at the South Pole to 90° at the North Pole, with 0° at the Equator.
Q 02Lines of constant latitude are known as what?
Parallels
They run east–west as circles parallel to the Equator; only the Equator itself is a great circle.
Q 03What are the imaginary pole-to-pole lines connecting points of equal longitude called?
Meridians
The prime meridian defines 0° longitude; its anti-meridian is at 180°.
Q 04Which Greek letter is conventionally used for latitude in English texts?
Phi
Longitude gets lambda (λ); both are measured in degrees, minutes and seconds.
Q 05Which Greek letter usually denotes longitude?
Lambda
Positive longitudes lie east of the prime meridian and negative ones west.
Q 06What is the latitude of the North Pole?
90° N
The South Pole is 90° S, written −90°.
Q 07How many degrees of longitude correspond to a one-hour difference in local solar time?
15°
The Earth turns 360° in 24 hours, which is why longitude and time-keeping are so tightly linked.
Q 08Near which London landmark does the international reference meridian pass?
Royal Observatory, Greenwich
Greenwich was chosen by 41 delegates from 25 nations at the 1884 International Meridian Conference.
Q 09In which city was the 1884 International Meridian Conference held?
Washington, D.C.
France argued for a neutral line, abstained, and kept using the Paris meridian until 1911.
Q 10Who established the position of the historic Greenwich meridian in 1851?
George Airy
It was defined by his transit circle; today's GPS meridian runs about 102 metres to the east of it.
Q 11How far east of the Airy transit circle does the IERS Reference Meridian run at Greenwich?
102 metres
The 5.3-arcsecond offset exists because Airy used astronomical longitude and the IERS uses a geodetic one.
Q 12Which navigation system uses the IERS Reference Meridian as its zero of longitude?
GPS
It is also the reference meridian of WGS 84 and the International Terrestrial Reference Frame.
Q 13Which country kept using the Paris meridian as its prime meridian until 1911?
France
In the 18th century most European states ran their prime meridian through their own capital.
Q 21Why are sites near the Equator, such as Kourou, good spaceport locations?
The fastest rotational speed on Earth
The ground moves at about 460 m/s there, cutting the fuel needed for eastward launches.
Q 22The word "equator" comes from a medieval Latin phrase meaning what?
Circle equalising day and night
On the equinoxes, every latitude gets roughly a 12-hour day and 12-hour night.
Q 23At roughly what latitude does the Tropic of Cancer lie?
23.4° N
It marks the northernmost point where the Sun can be directly overhead, at the June solstice.
Q 14Which ancient geographer first used a consistent prime meridian for a world map?
Ptolemy
He ran it through the "Fortunate Isles" in the Atlantic so that every longitude would be positive.
Q 15Who is generally credited with inventing the geographic coordinate system?
Eratosthenes
He composed his now-lost Geography at the Library of Alexandria in the 3rd century BC.
Q 16Which Greek astronomer divided the Earth into 360° and ran his prime meridian through Alexandria?
Hipparchus
He also proposed timing a lunar eclipse from two places to find their longitude difference.
Q 17What is the circumference of the Earth at the Equator, to the nearest thousand kilometres?
40,000 km
Precisely 40,075 km; the equatorial diameter is about 43 km greater than the polar one.
Q 18The Equator passes through the land of how many sovereign states?
Eleven
Indonesia straddles the greatest length of it; the Maldives, Kiribati and the US touch it only at sea.
Q 19Which country straddles the greatest length of the Equator?
Indonesia
The highest point on the Equator is 4,690 m up the slopes of Volcán Cayambe in Ecuador.
Q 20The Equator is the only line of latitude that is also what?
A great circle
Its plane passes through the centre of the globe; every other parallel is a smaller circle.
Q 24On which date is the Sun directly overhead at the Tropic of Capricorn?
The December solstice
It is the southernmost latitude where the Sun can be seen at the zenith.
Q 25In which zodiac constellation does the Sun actually appear at the June solstice in the 21st century?
Taurus
Precession has shifted it since the Tropic of Cancer was named; at the December solstice the Sun is in Sagittarius.
Q 26The Tropic of Cancer is the southern limit of which alliance's mutual-defence obligation?
NATO
Members are not obliged to defend territory south of that line.
Q 27At roughly what latitude is the Arctic Circle?
66.5° N
South of it the Sun never stays up or down for a full 24 hours.
Q 28At about what rate is the Arctic Circle drifting towards the North Pole in the 21st century?
14.5 metres per year
It tracks the Earth's axial tilt, which swings by about 2° over a 41,000-year cycle.
Q 29What does the word "arctic" mean in its original Greek?
Near the Bear
Arktos is the bear, for the constellations Ursa Major and Minor in the northern sky.
Q 30The latitude of the polar circles equals what, in terms of Earth's axial tilt i?
90° minus i
The tropics sit at latitude i itself, currently about 23.44°.