Size It Up

Size It Up Geography

COUNTRIES · US STATES · NORTH–SOUTH OR EAST–WEST

ROUND 1 / 5 today’s five
0 / 500

Reference —

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Drag to move · pull a corner or scroll over it to resize · Enter to lock
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How to play Size It Up

  1. Compare. The black silhouette is the reference. It is at true scale and never changes.
  2. Resize. Drag the white silhouette and pull any corner or edge of its frame (or pinch, or scroll over it) until it looks right next to the reference. Zoom out if you need room.
  3. Lock in. The true size is drawn in red over your guess. Within 6% scores 100; twice or half the size scores 45; five times off scores 0.

Countries and US states as cut-outs, drawn on an equal-area projection so nothing near the poles is inflated. The ruler shows the reference’s span along its longer axis; make the other outline the right size beside it.

Why maps lie to you

The map on the wall is a Mercator projection, and it stretches everything far from the equator. Greenland looks the size of Africa; it is a fourteenth of it. Alaska looks bigger than Mexico; it is not. Size It Up Geography draws every outline on an equal-area projection centred on the place itself, so the shape you see is the shape that exists, and the only thing you have to get right is how big it is.

Every outline comes from Natural Earth, a public-domain map dataset, at a resolution of one to fifty million. Spans are measured on the sphere, not on the page.