Beyond the answers - interesting background to this quiz

When a war redraws the map

The First World War ran from 1914 to 1918 and reshaped the political map of Europe. The fighting ended with an armistice on 11 November 1918, a date still marked in many countries as Remembrance Day or Armistice Day. The peace treaties that followed dissolved several empires and created new states, setting the stage for tensions that would resurface two decades later.

Latin: the language that never quite disappeared

Latin was the language of Ancient Rome and spread across Europe with the empire. Even after Rome fell, Latin remained the language of the Church and of scholarship for centuries. It is the ancestor of the Romance languages, including Italian, Spanish, French, Portuguese and Romanian, and its influence lingers in law, medicine and science.

The Amazon and its vast watershed

The Amazon has the largest drainage basin of any river in the world, covering roughly 40 percent of South America. Its basin spans several countries, with most of it in Brazil, and feeds the river with water from the Andes to the Atlantic. The Amazon rainforest, which the basin supports, is home to an extraordinary share of the planet's known species.

Peru and the legacy of the Inca

Peru sits on the western side of South America, facing the Pacific Ocean. It was the heartland of the Inca Empire, whose capital was Cusco, before Spanish colonisation in the sixteenth century. Today it is known for archaeological sites such as Machu Picchu, as well as for its diverse cuisine and indigenous languages, including Quechua.

The Pacific: the largest ocean on Earth

The Pacific Ocean is the largest and deepest of the world's oceans, stretching from the Arctic to the Antarctic and bordered by Asia and Australia on one side and the Americas on the other. It contains the Mariana Trench, the deepest known point on the planet, and covers more surface area than all the land on Earth combined.