Can You Beat 400 People at U.S. Geography?

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By Max Knoblauch2014-04-13 11:06:56 UTC

Just where the hell is Wyoming, anyway? If a survey of 400 people on the Internet is any indication, most of us have no idea.

The folks at Movoto wanted to test common theories about geographic illiteracy against real-time results. Challenging several hundred people to hover over states on their computer screens, the researchers gave each participant five seconds to correctly identify and locate a given U.S. state on a map, while tracking their answers in real time.

The results, unfortunately, are probably what you'd expect (cue the womp womp).

See also: The Ultimate 'Jeopardy!' Quiz Starring Ken Jennings

Although an overwhelming majority of quiz-takers correctly identified the biggest states — looking at you California, Florida and Texas — much of middle America and the Northeast saw less-than-stellar answers.

Many participants mixed up Pennsylvania, New York, Vermont and New Hampshire, as well as the four corner states of Utah, Colorado, Arizona and New Mexico. Even worse results came when the quiz prompted users to find Missouri, and the cursors scattered randomly over the bible belt. What did Missouri do to warrant such a complete lack of recognition? Let's be better for Missouri.

If you think you're up to the elementary school challenge of correctly identifying where states are, you can give it a shot below. Just know before you judge that the original quiz-takers didn't have hundreds of little colorful dots helping them along the way.

Created by Movoto

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Topics: geography, Health & Fitness, maps, quiz, Travel & Leisure, united states, U.S., US & World, Work & Play