I may be wrong, but just by eye Norway looks like it should be on this quiz. It looks wider than Turkey and Libya. Is this just because of distortion on my map to make countries that are further north look wider, or should it be on here?
No, I mean width. Just by longitude it has a 26 degree east-west span compared to 19 for Turkey and 16 for Libya (approximately). I am not sure it is really possible to measure such a distance in miles and this is probably why there is no secondary source to back the quiz up. You can measure a distance in miles but on a spherical earth you can't really say how much of that is the east-west or the north-south direction.
Because of the Earth being a sphere, longitude lines get closer together the closer they get to the poles, so they can all meet at them. This means that countries in the far north or south, like Norway, cover more longitude lines despite not being as wide.
I'm not sure. Since we're dealing with speculation, we could imagine than Indonesia land, if all one mass, might be lined up in a straight north-south line. No way to know, since we're speculating!
Clearly the question/parameters of the question is poorly defined. The distance between the eastern-most point to the western-most point of both Norway and Sweden would surely make them eligible to be on this list.
The only way they wouldn't would be if you are measuring a single, longest UNBROKEN span of the country, which you don't define in the question. Update your question if you must, because otherwise I see an error in this quiz.
It's only east-west distance. Because Norway and Sweden are both quite *tall* as well that part of the distance must not be counted. But I agree that the question is not really defined in the quiz. I think there probably is a way to measure the distance so that the countries closer to the poles are not disadvantaged but I'm not sure if this is what was used or not.
The note says "continuous land mass," and much of Indonesia is separated by the ocean. I think that once you wade into that territory (excuse the pun), it gets dicey. You'd probably have to add Micronesia and Kiribati too.
Argentina should be on here as the distance from Glaciar Perito Moreno in South-West Argentina and Comandante Andresito in North-East Argentina when the latitude is averaged out as 38.0828 degrees South and only the longitudes are different the distance is 1667km according to NOAA's distance calculator based on coordinates. Therefore Argentina should be on this list.
If there was a very narrow country going from the equator to the north pole and just missing the north pole in the right way, this quiz would give it a width of about 20 000 km even though it would only be about 10 000 km long.
It is not intuitive because Morocco appears on the map to stretch mainly north to south. Also, I imagine I am not the only to assume that Western Sahara would not be part of the measurement because it is not recognized by the UN as being an integral part of Morocco. So that might make folks less likely to guess it also.
It's including Western Sahara. (Even though nobody recognizes Moroccan control over it, and not all of it is controlled by Morocco, but that's QM's bias for you)
Morocco is tough. I was happy with my 15/20, and the rest I think I maybe could have gotten with enough time, but Morocco didn't even cross my mind. I wonder what that says about North Africa geographically.
On the plus side, I typing in the least gotten country-Morocco. :D
How is Indonesia not here though
The only way they wouldn't would be if you are measuring a single, longest UNBROKEN span of the country, which you don't define in the question. Update your question if you must, because otherwise I see an error in this quiz.
CONTINUAL LANDMASSES Indonesia is made up of islands
Even smaller than turkey's width