Identify the Landmark Quiz — 7 Free Questions

Question 1

This white marble tomb in northern India was built in the 1600s by a Mughal emperor for his favourite wife, who died giving birth to their 14th child. Its perfectly symmetrical dome and four corner towers are reflected in a long water channel. It took more than 20,000 workers about 20 years to finish.

Question 2

This large, brilliant-white Japanese hilltop fortress has a maze of walls, gates and courtyards leading up to a soaring central keep of six visible storeys. Built in its present form around 1609, it is nicknamed the 'White Heron' for its shape and colour, and it survived centuries of war, earthquakes and wartime bombing almost untouched.

Question 3

This huge oval stone amphitheatre in the centre of an Italian capital could hold tens of thousands of spectators for gladiator fights, animal hunts and public executions. Opened in AD 80, it had a retractable awning for shade and could even be flooded for mock sea battles. Earthquakes and stone-robbing left it half-ruined.

Question 4

This pair of matching 88-storey skyscrapers in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, is joined near the middle by a two-storey sky bridge that visitors can walk across. Their pointed steel-and-glass tops are shaped after patterns in Islamic art. From 1998 to 2004 they were the tallest buildings in the world.

Question 5

This crossing over the Thames in London has two tall stone piers linked by high walkways, and a roadway in the middle that splits and lifts up to let tall ships pass. It opened in 1894 and is often confused with an older, plainer crossing just upstream.

Question 6

Dozens of steep, narrow, flat-topped pyramids, far smaller and much pointier than the famous Egyptian ones, stand in rows on desert dunes in Sudan. They were royal tombs of the kingdom of Kush, built between about 300 BC and AD 350, and each once had a small offering chapel attached to its east side.

Question 7

This medieval abbey sits on top of a small rocky cone rising out of tidal flats off the coast of Normandy, in northern France. At high tide the sea surrounds it and cuts it off; at low tide people once crossed the sand on foot, sometimes fatally. A causeway now links it to the mainland.

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About Identify the Landmark

Can you name the place? Each question shows a photograph of a famous landmark -- a building, a monument, a ruin or a rock -- and gives three short, easy sentences about it: roughly where it is, when and why it was built, and what it looks like, without ever saying its name. You then pick it from four choices, and the answer fills in the full story.

The landmarks are spread across the whole world and across thousands of years. Some are ancient: the three pyramids on the edge of Cairo, built about 4,500 years ago and the tallest things people made for the next 38 centuries; the ring of standing stones on an English plain; the marble temple to a warrior goddess above Athens; the Maya step-pyramid in the forests of Mexico. Others are barely a century old: the concrete figure of Jesus on a mountain above Rio de Janeiro, finished in 1931, or the shell-roofed concert house that juts into Sydney's harbour, opened in 1973. A few, like the row of carved stone giants on one of the loneliest islands in the Pacific, sit in between and are still not fully explained.

Part of the fun is learning to read a landmark by its shape. A tall thin spike is usually a tower or a minaret; a rounded top is a dome, often over a tomb or a place of worship; a stepped triangle is a pyramid; rows of columns holding up a triangular roof mean an ancient Greek or Roman temple; a wide deck slung between two tall towers is a suspension bridge. Materials give hints too, from rough prehistoric boulders to polished white marble to 20th-century concrete and steel.

Many of these places share a life story. They were built to show off the power or wealth of a king, an emperor, a city or a religion. They were then half-ruined by earthquakes, wars, or people carting away the stone for other buildings. Several were more or less forgotten by the outside world for centuries before a traveller, an explorer or an archaeologist brought them back to attention. Today almost all are protected sites, many on the UNESCO World Heritage list, and several are so popular that visitor numbers have to be capped. Their outlines turn up on banknotes, stamps, flags and national badges all over the world.

The clues deliberately leave out the landmark's name and any single word that would instantly give it away, so getting the answer means recognising the shape and the history rather than reading a label. Every photograph is a freely licensed image from Wikimedia Commons, chosen from public-domain or Creative Commons sources so there is no copyright question, and every fact in the clue and the answer has been checked. The language is kept simple on purpose, so the quiz plays the same whether you grew up near one of these places or have only ever seen it in pictures.