Basel is distinct because it's at the border where Germany, France and Switzerland meet. I recognized the name because I've seen it on a Jetpunk quiz before
Definitely agree. I often score over 90 percentile and in this case also didn´t make up more than 3. I also heard of Lausanne because of Lausanne peace treaty, which ended Turkish war of independence after WWI, but I thought it was rather an quarter or palace in France like Versailles, Saint-Germain, Neuilly-sur-Seine or Sévres.
I know Zurich and Geneva because they are popular cities, Bern because its the capital, Basel from football, and Lucerne because I've been there before. Switzerland is an amazing country.
Lausanne: seat of the International Olympic Committee. St. Gallen: seat of an awesome abbey library that served as one of Europe's intellectual centers during the Middle Ages. Basel: a place of carnival and cultural freedom since the Renaissance, and the setting of Hermann Hesse's "Steppenwolf" :)
Yeah, I thought it seemed weird too. I just looked it up and apparently in Switzerland (at least in some cases) the apostrophe is used as a "thousands" separator instead of a comma, and the comma is used for decimals instead of a period. Any Swiss folks want to elaborate?
Not Swiss but the comma is commonly used for decimals outside of the English speaking world. Here's a map. Apostrophe seems to be a Swiss thing according to Wikipedia but I think I've seen it a few times in Germany as well.
In Switzerland it is the normal separator for numbers. In the spoken language (german, french, italian) we say comma for decimal numbers and not point, so that is also the way we write it. I wasn't aware that this was so unusual
switzerland
Period (.) is the decimal separator
Apostrophe (') is the 1'000 indicator.
The big advantage is that they are very distinct - even with a very sloppy handwriting... (e.g. 1'234'456.00)