Geography quiz clarifications
Readers raise some interesting points about world facts
Published 4:00 am, Sunday, December 28, 2008
If you ignore the fact that Question 31 just vanished into the ether, rendering it a 49-question quiz rather than the advertised 50, this year's geography quiz was remarkably free of the mistakes and muddled thinking that are its traditional hallmarks.
A few readers, though, did raise some interesting points:
-- David Young wondered about Question 42: "True or false: The Pacific is larger than all the world's other oceans put together." He noted that our answer dealt only with the size of their respective surface areas. "What about volume?" he e-mailed. "Does the volume of the Pacific Ocean (with all those deep trenches) exceed the volume of the other oceans combined?"
Good question. An article in the online Encarta encyclopedia lists the Pacific Ocean's volume as 163.1 million cubic miles. The volumes of the Atlantic, Indian, Southern and Arctic oceans combined are listed as 166 million cubic miles. So, we're relieved to report, the answer in both cases (surface area, total volume) is the same: almost, but not quite.
-- Dennis Hoey begs to differ with part of our answer to Question 37 ("What was the world's first city to reach a population of 1 million?") Our answer: "Rome, in 133 B.C.," and we should have stopped there. But we had to add: "It wasn't until 1810 that another city, London, hit that mark."
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Hoey cites Laurence Bergreen's recent biography of Marco Polo, which estimates that the population of the Chinese city of Quinsai (now Hangzhou) at that time - roughly 1275 - was 1.5 million, and the Encyclopedia Britannica goes as high as 2 million.
"Makes you wonder," adds Hoey, "what was going on in India."
-- Roger L. Duba wrote to say that our answer to Question 33 ("Do any U.S. states have perfectly square or rectangular borders?"), while technically correct, was somewhat misleading. No, we said, the eastern and western borders of such states as Wyoming and Colorado might look like they're parallel, but they actually follow lines of longitude that converge at the poles.
"Colorado's western border (and Utah's eastern border) has a slight bend in it," Duba wrote. "The story is that one boundary survey party started at the Wyoming line and worked south, while another started from Four Corners and worked north. When they met, neither would admit they were wrong, so they just left a jog in the boundary. At one time, an attempt was made to straighten it, but residents of both states objected. Those living in Colorado did not want to be moved into Utah, and vice versa."
In checking, I came across several slight variations to the surveying story, but Duba is absolutely right that there's a little zig in the otherwise-straight border.
-- A reader who identified himself only as "rustam" pointed out that in our list of seas whose surfaces are below sea level, we should have included California's Salton Sea. He's right.
-- Finally, Alex McMurray pointed out that we misspelled the name of the conqueror of the Matterhorn. So, in his honor, this article will end not with a bang, but with a (correctly spelled) Whymper.