How to recognise countries by their shape

Country shapes look hard at first because there's no colour or text to help. But outlines have their own clues, and once you know what to look for, many become unmistakable.

A few shapes are so distinctive that they make good anchors:

• Italy is the boot, kicking the island of Sicily.
• Chile is a long, thin ribbon: more than 4,000 km from north to south and, on average, less than 200 km wide.
• Vietnam curves in an S-shape along the coast of the South China Sea.
• Thailand is often compared to an elephant's head, with the Malay Peninsula as the trunk.
• France is nicknamed l'Hexagone because of its roughly six-sided shape.

Long, ruler-straight borders usually mean a desert or a border drawn on a map rather than following rivers or mountains. Egypt's western and southern borders are almost perfect straight lines, and so are many of Libya's. If an outline looks like a box with one wiggly coastline, think North Africa or the Arabian Peninsula.

Some countries are shaped by a single feature:

• Gambia follows the Gambia River inland, a thin strip almost completely surrounded by Senegal.
• Malawi stretches along the length of Lake Malawi.
• Norway has a long, ragged western coast cut by fjords.
• Croatia curves like a crescent around Bosnia and Herzegovina, along the Adriatic coast.

Panhandles and thin corridors are great clues. Namibia has the Caprivi Strip, a narrow finger reaching east towards Zambia. DR Congo, although huge, reaches the Atlantic only through a short, narrow corridor. Thailand's long southern tail is another giveaway.

In AtlasGenie's shapes quiz, every outline is drawn to fill the same frame and marked "Not to scale", so Russia and Belgium appear the same size. Don't use size as a clue. Focus on proportions instead: is the shape tall or wide, compact or stretched, solid or full of islands?

Start with one region on Explorer, where the wrong answers come from random countries, and learn the five or six most distinctive shapes first. Then switch to Expert, where the wrong answers are neighbours with similar outlines. Each country page shows the country's outline next to its flag, which helps you connect the two.