Beyond the answers - interesting background to this quiz

The river that has hosted empires

Vienna owes much of its historic wealth to the Danube, which flows through the city on its long journey from Germany's Black Forest to the Black Sea. For centuries the river was a trade artery linking Central Europe with the Balkans, and the Habsburg capital grew rich on that traffic. Today the Danube passes through more capital cities than any other river in the world, among them Bratislava, Budapest, Belgrade and Vienna itself.

Tallinn and the Baltic crossroads

Tallinn, the Estonian capital, sits on the Gulf of Finland and has been a trading hub since the Middle Ages, when it was known as Reval. Its walled Old Town, with towers and cobbled lanes largely intact, is a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Estonia's location has made it a meeting point of Scandinavian, German and Slavic influences, and its digital economy now gives the small country an outsized reputation far beyond the Baltic.

The Sahel, a belt of transition

Senegal lies in the Sahel, the semi-arid band that stretches across Africa between the Sahara to the north and the savannas to the south. The word itself comes from Arabic and means "shore" or "coast", evoking a sea of sand. Rainfall in the region is scarce and unpredictable, which shapes the livelihoods of the people who live there, from pastoralists to farmers.

Monet and the garden at Giverny

Claude Monet painted his famous Water Lilies series in the garden he created at Giverny, west of Paris. He designed the pond and planted it himself, then spent years returning to the same subject at different hours and in different light. The result was a body of work that pushed painting toward abstraction, and many of the large panels are now displayed in dedicated oval rooms in Paris.

Liberty, barricades and a painter's gamble

Eugène Delacroix painted "Liberty Leading the People" in response to the July Revolution of 1830 in Paris, which toppled King Charles X. The central figure, a woman holding the French tricolour, blends allegory with the gritty reality of the barricades. Delacroix included himself among the figures, a hat-wearing man beside Liberty, a quiet signature in a very public painting.