Identify the Landmark Quiz — 7 Free Questions

Question 1

This ancient city in southern Jordan was carved directly into rose-red sandstone cliffs by the Nabataeans, a people who grew rich controlling desert trade routes. Its most famous facade, a temple-like tomb, is reached through a long, narrow gorge. The city was largely forgotten by the outside world for centuries.

Question 2

This is the largest Buddhist monument in the world, a 9th-century stepped stone pyramid on the island of Java in Indonesia. Pilgrims walk clockwise up its nine levels, past more than 2,500 carved panels, to a top ringed by 72 bell-shaped shrines, each holding a stone statue.

Question 3

This sprawling hilltop palace-and-fortress complex was built by Muslim rulers in Granada, in southern Spain, mostly in the 1200s and 1300s. Behind plain reddish outer walls lie delicate courtyards with fountains and pools, and rooms covered in lace-like carved plaster and coloured tiles.

Question 4

This green copper figure of a robed woman holding up a torch was a gift from France to the United States in 1886, marking a century of American independence. It stands on a small island at the entrance to New York Harbor. Visitors can climb a spiral stair to a viewing gallery in the crown.

Question 5

This orange-red suspension bridge spans the strait where a large bay meets the Pacific Ocean, on the west coast of the United States. When it opened in 1937 its main span was the longest in the world. Its towers rise about 227 metres and it is often wrapped in fog.

Question 6

This vast walled complex of nearly 1,000 low buildings with golden roofs sits at the very centre of Beijing, ringed by a wide moat. It was the home and court of Chinese emperors for almost 500 years, and ordinary people were not allowed inside, which is where its name comes from.

Question 7

This slender 553-metre concrete observation and broadcasting mast rises above Toronto, Canada, with a bulge near the top holding viewing decks, a revolving restaurant and a glass floor you can stand on. It held the record as the world's tallest free-standing structure for over 30 years.

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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.