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What is the capital of Australia, and do you know the other 194?

The capital of Australia is Canberra, not Sydney and not Melbourne. Canada's capital is Ottawa, Italy's is Rome, and Brazil's is Brasília, a city built from empty scrubland in the 1950s. Those four are the easy ones. Here are the rest.

World capitals quiz

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The four capitals people look up most

Four commonly searched capital cities
CountryCapitalThe city people guess instead
AustraliaCanberraSydney or Melbourne
CanadaOttawaToronto
ItalyRomeMilan
BrazilBrasíliaRio de Janeiro or São Paulo

Three of those four are the same story. Canberra, Ottawa and Brasília were all chosen or built to settle an argument, not because they were already the biggest city. Canberra was a compromise between Sydney and Melbourne. Ottawa was picked by Queen Victoria in 1857, partly because it sat on the border between Canada East and Canada West. Brasília was raised on the empty central plateau between 1956 and 1960 to pull the country inland from its coast. Rome is the exception: it is the capital because it was Rome.

How the quiz works

Choose multiple choice or typing, pick ten rounds, twenty, or every country in scope, and filter by region if you want to work through one continent at a time. In multiple choice the three wrong answers are real capitals from the same continent, so the shape of the word will not give it away. In type mode, spelling is forgiving: accents, hyphens and case are ignored, so "brasilia" is accepted for Brasília and "reykjavik" for Reykjavík.

Countries with more than one seat of government are handled properly. South Africa has three capitals, Pretoria, Cape Town and Bloemfontein, and all three are accepted. So are both of Bolivia's, Sucre and La Paz, and both of Eswatini's, Mbabane and Lobamba. Sri Lanka answers to Sri Jayawardenepura Kotte and to Colombo. Where a country is a genuinely contested case, the quiz says so instead of pretending the question is simple.

Capitals are the easy part

A capital is a fact. It is the kind of thing you can hold for a week and lose in a month, because nothing else in your head is attached to it. What makes Brasília interesting is not its name, it is that a country decided to move its centre of gravity five hundred miles inland and then did it. What makes Naypyidaw interesting is that Myanmar built a new capital in the 2000s that most of its own citizens have never visited.

That is the difference between knowing a list and knowing a place. If you want the countries themselves, try naming all 195 or the flag quiz. If you want capitals to stick, the method is in how to remember every country in the world.

Common questions

What is the capital of Australia?
Canberra. It is not Sydney and not Melbourne, which is the most common wrong answer in the world. Canberra was purpose built as a compromise between those two rival cities, and the site was chosen in 1908 roughly halfway between them.
What is the capital of Canada?
Ottawa, in the province of Ontario, on the border with Quebec. Queen Victoria selected it in 1857, ahead of larger rivals such as Toronto, Montreal, Quebec City and Kingston, in part because its position straddled the line between Canada East and Canada West.
What is the capital of Italy?
Rome. It has been the capital of a unified Italy since 1871, when the Italian state moved its seat there from Florence. Milan is the larger commercial centre, which is why it is the usual wrong answer.
What is the capital of Brazil?
Brasilia. It was built from scratch on the central plateau between 1956 and 1960 and replaced Rio de Janeiro as the capital in April 1960. Rio and Sao Paulo are both much larger, which is why people still name them first.
Which countries have more than one capital?
Several. South Africa has three: Pretoria (executive), Cape Town (legislative) and Bloemfontein (judicial). Bolivia has Sucre as its constitutional capital and La Paz as the seat of government. Eswatini has Mbabane and Lobamba. This quiz accepts every recognised seat.
Is Amsterdam or The Hague the capital of the Netherlands?
Amsterdam is the constitutional capital, and the quiz takes it as the answer. The government, the parliament and the Supreme Court all sit in The Hague, which is why the question feels like a trick. Both facts are true at once.
What is the hardest capital city to remember?
Ngerulmud, the capital of Palau, is the usual winner: it is one of the least populated national capitals in the world. Naypyidaw in Myanmar and Sri Jayawardenepura Kotte in Sri Lanka come close, both for spelling and for being newer than the cities people expect.
Is this capitals quiz free to use?
Yes. No account, no sign up, no ads. The whole quiz runs in your browser using the same 195 country dataset as the rest of this site, and your best score is stored on your own device rather than on a server.

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