People are happy to guess which parts of the world everyone ignores. We can check, because the game we run asks a few thousand people a day to find a country on a blank globe and records exactly where the first tap lands. That is a quarter of a million data points about what the world does and does not know.
Group them by continent and you get the answer everyone expects. Look one level closer and that answer falls apart.
A 22 point spread between Africa and Europe. You could write the usual article from that alone, and plenty of people have. It would also be misleading, because the gap inside each region is far bigger than the gap between them.
Egypt is found by 91% of players. South Africa by 88%, Morocco by 84%, Madagascar by 81%. Those numbers beat most of Europe. Africa's average is dragged down not by Africa but by one stretch of it: the small West African states, where Liberia sits at 28%, Sierra Leone at 31%, Burkina Faso at 31% and Senegal at 32%.
Here is the finding that surprised us. Central America scores worse than Africa does.
| Country | Found on the first tap |
|---|---|
| El Salvador | 39.9% |
| Costa Rica | 40.2% |
| Honduras | 41.5% |
| Guatemala | 41.6% |
| Guyana | 41.3% |
| Suriname | 41.0% |
Every one of those is below Africa's continental average of 49.5%. The Americas look respectable overall because Brazil, the United States, Canada and Mexico are found by more than nine players in ten, and they carry the region on their backs.
Sort the whole list and the pattern is not continental at all. The countries people cannot find share three traits:
That last point is the one worth sitting with. Almost everyone reading this could name El Salvador. Six in ten could not put a finger on it.
The ranked list of all 166 countries by how often people find them is the full version of this. If you want to fix the gaps rather than read about them, the method that works is spaced repetition, and it takes a few months rather than a weekend.
Find today's five countriesfree, no signup, about two minutes