Bing Australia Quiz – How Well Do You Know Australia?

Ask someone to name Australia's capital and you'll get "Sydney" more often than not, which is wrong but understandable — Sydney has the opera house, the harbor, the population, basically the whole postcard.

Canberra was actually built from scratch specifically because Sydney and Melbourne couldn't agree on which of them deserved the title, so the government picked a spot roughly between the two and planted a purpose-built capital there in 1913. That's the kind of compromise you find all over Australian history once you dig past the kangaroo-and-beach version most outsiders know.

This quiz covers geography, wildlife, history, and a few cultural details that tend to separate people who've actually been there from people going off movies and nature documentaries.

Fun fact

Australia is home to more venomous snake species than any other country on Earth, but you're statistically far more likely to be killed by a horse or a cow than by any of them — snake bite deaths average around two per year nationally.

Sample question explanations

Q: What is the capital city of Australia?
Answer: Canberra
Canberra was purpose-built as a compromise capital after Sydney and Melbourne both refused to concede the title to the other. An American architect, Walter Burley Griffin, won an international design competition for the city's layout in 1912, and construction started the following year.

Q: Roughly how long have Aboriginal Australians lived on the continent?
Answer: At least 65,000 years
Excavations at sites like Madjedbebe in the Northern Territory have pushed the estimate back further with each new dig, making Aboriginal Australian culture one of the oldest continuous cultures documented anywhere in the world.

Q: What is the name of the massive sandstone rock formation sacred to the Anangu people in central Australia?
Answer: Uluru
It was known internationally as Ayers Rock for much of the 20th century, named after a colonial premier who likely never saw it himself. The dual name Uluru/Ayers Rock was adopted in 1993, and Uluru became the sole official name in 2002.

Q: What unusual trait does the platypus have that surprised European naturalists when it was first described?
Answer: It lays eggs despite being a mammal
When a platypus specimen was first sent to Britain in 1799, scientists reportedly assumed it was a hoax stitched together from other animals. It's one of only five living mammal species that lay eggs instead of giving birth to live young.

Q: Which Australian city hosted the Summer Olympics in 2000?
Answer: Sydney
The Sydney Games are often ranked among the best-organized in Olympic history. Cathy Freeman's 400-meter gold medal win, run in front of a home crowd, is still one of the most replayed moments in Australian sports history.

What this quiz is about

This one's built to push past the surface-level image of Australia — the deep history that predates European settlement by tens of thousands of years, the wildlife that evolved nowhere else, and a few facts about how the country actually organizes itself that even people who've watched plenty of travel shows tend to miss.