World Mountains Quiz — 7 Free Questions

Question 1

At 8,167 m, this is the seventh-highest mountain, and in the early 1800s surveyors briefly thought it was the world's tallest. Its name is Sanskrit for roughly 'dazzling white mountain.' It rises steeply above one of the deepest river valleys on Earth, and was not climbed until 1960. Which mountain fits this description?

Question 2

At 4,392 m, this ice-covered volcano stands out more sharply from the land around it than any other peak in its part of a big country. It is also one of the most dangerous, because its mudflows could reach nearby towns. A nearby city, home to a famous coffee company, once lent its name to a sports team. Which peak is being described here?

Question 3

At 5,199 m, this is its continent's second-highest mountain, a worn-down extinct volcano older than its taller neighbour. It shares its name with the country it stands in, and its small equatorial glaciers are shrinking fast and expected to vanish soon. Name this mountain.

Question 4

At 8,051 m, this is the twelfth-highest mountain, named for a wide summit ridge about 1.5 km long. It stands close to the world's second-highest peak, and a four-man Austrian team first climbed it in 1957 with no bottled oxygen and no hired carriers. Which mountain fits this description?

Question 5

At 2,810 m, this flat-topped mountain rises straight out of the rainforest with sheer cliffs on every side, and its summit sits at the point where three countries meet. Its lonely table top is said to have inspired a famous 'lost world' novel about surviving prehistoric animals. Which mountain fits this description?

Question 6

At 8,188 m, this is the sixth-highest mountain, but it is rated the easiest of the 14 peaks above 8,000 m for experienced climbers. Its name means about 'Turquoise Goddess' in Tibetan. Its gentle usual route makes it a common warm-up before a taller mountain nearby. Can you name this mountain?

Question 7

At 3,776 m, this is its country's highest mountain by far, an active volcano that last erupted in the early 1700s. Its neat cone fills hundreds of years of woodblock prints, and each short summer hundreds of thousands climb it, many overnight to watch the sunrise. Can you name this mountain?

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About World Mountains

Mountains are ranked by more than just raw elevation above sea level, and once you start comparing them a different way, the familiar "world's tallest" list gets a lot more interesting. Mount Everest is the highest point above sea level at 8,849 meters, but measured from its true base on the surrounding ocean floor, Hawaii's Mauna Kea actually stands taller overall, at roughly 10,200 meters base to summit, most of it simply hidden beneath the Pacific. Ecuador's Chimborazo takes the title a third way: thanks to the equatorial bulge created by Earth's own rotation, its summit is the single point on the planet's surface farthest from the Earth's center, ahead of Everest by more than two kilometers, despite being over two and a half kilometers shorter measured from sea level.

The fourteen mountains that exceed 8,000 meters, a group mountaineers call the "eight-thousanders," are almost all clustered within the Himalayas and the neighboring Karakoram range in Nepal, Pakistan, China, and India, meaning a huge share of the planet's highest terrain sits within a relatively compact stretch of Central and South Asia. K2, the second-highest peak on Earth, is widely considered far more dangerous to climb than Everest itself, earning it the grim nickname "Savage Mountain" for its unusually high ratio of climber deaths to successful summits.

Many of the world's most striking peaks are volcanoes rather than the folded, uplifted rock typical of ranges like the Alps or Rockies. Kilimanjaro, Mount Fuji, Cotopaxi, and Mexico's Popocatepetl and Pico de Orizaba are all volcanic in origin, and several remain active today. Ojos del Salado, on the Chile-Argentina border, holds the distinction of being the tallest active volcano on Earth, at 6,893 meters. This volcanic ancestry also explains why so many famous peaks stand in dramatic isolation rather than as part of a connected range, since a single eruption point tends to build a solitary cone rather than a long ridge of neighboring summits.

A number of mountains carry weight far beyond their physical size. Mount Kailash, in Tibet, stands only 6,638 meters tall, modest by Himalayan standards, yet no confirmed ascent has ever taken place, since climbing it is prohibited out of respect for its status as sacred ground across four major world religions. Mount Olympus in Greece, mythological home of the Twelve Olympians, and Mount Sinai in Egypt, traditionally identified as the site where Moses received the Ten Commandments, likewise draw visitors for reasons that have little to do with technical climbing difficulty.

National borders complicate the picture too. Aconcagua, the tallest peak outside Asia, sits in Argentina near the Chilean border, while a genuine handful of major summits, including Everest itself, straddle an international boundary directly across the summit, leaving no single country able to claim the peak entirely on its own. Deciding which country a mountain "belongs to" turns out to be a surprisingly common source of friendly, occasionally serious, international debate.