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.
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)