Nerd Alert: Ken Fisher’s Super Quiz gets coastlines wrong

Florida has the longest marine coastline in the lower 48 (Image Credit: Wikimedia)

Like many readers of daily newspapers, I enjoy Ken Fisher’s Super Quiz — a syndicated trivia game—but today’s quiz on coastlines is rife with glaring errors and frustrating imprecision. Failing either to educate or entertain, it instead perpetuates geographical ignorance.

All of Fisher’s questions concern state and country coastline lengths. As an example, he asks which US state has the longest coastline, and supplies the correct answer: Alaska, with a whopping 6,640 miles of coastline — more than most countries.

For maximum enjoyment of this essay, I suggest you begin by taking today’s SuperQuiz to see how you do yourself:

1. Longest coastline in the lower 48?
2. Country with world’s longest coastline?
3. European country with longest coastline?
4. Asian country with longest coastline: Indonesia?
5. Western Hemisphere country with longest coastline?
6. South American country with longest coastline?
7. Shortest coastline among US coastal states?
8. African country with longest coastline?
9. Country in mainland Africa with longest coastline?