In this Friday, January 7, 2011 photo, people carry baskets of coal scavenged illegally at an open-cast mine in the village of Bokapahari in the eastern Indian state of Jharkhand where a community of coal scavengers live and work. The world's biggest coal users – China, the United States and India – have boosted coal mining in 2017, in an abrupt departure from last year's record global decline for the heavily polluting fuel and a setback to efforts to rein in climate change emissions. (Photo by Kevin Frayer/AP Photo)

Jassen Todorov, 40, from San Francisco is a professor of music at San Francisco State University, but he took to helicoptering in his spare time. While he was content to keep the panoramic views he witnessed to himself, Todorov has now paired his passion for flying with photography to capture some of the United States’ undiscovered vistas. Here: Grand Prismatic Spring, Yellowstone, Wyoming. (Photo by Jassen Todorov/Caters News)

An American white pelican takes flight on the island of Petatan in the municipality of Cojumatlan de Regules, Michoacan state, Mexico on February 23, 2024. The island becomes home to the pelicans during the winter, when they travel from the north of the United States and the south of Canada to the warmer waters of Lake Chapala in Mexico. The birds are a tourist attraction and people gather on the island's boardwalk to feed them and watch them fly. (Photo by Enrique Castro/AFP Photo)

How sure are you of your geographical knowledge? Buzzfeed recently put Americans’ geographical knowledge to the test with a survey in which participants had to write in countries’ names on a blank European political map. Unfortunately, they didn’t fare too well, but some of their responses are hilarious (or hilariously mis-informed). But don’t be so quick to judge Americans – when Buzzfeed posted a similar survey testing Brits’ knowledge of the 50 United States, they also came up short. On the one hand, knowing a country’s states is different from knowing independent countries, but on the other, some U.S. states are larger than some European nations, and some U.S. states have larger economies than some European nations.

A tour group wanders through block 7 of Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania April 30, 2014. Opened in 1829, with the original corrective system of “confinement in solitude with labor”, the penitentiary housed about 75,000 inmates in its 142 years of operation. At Eastern State reunions, former inmates, staff and guard gather to share memories and trade stories and get a chance to describe their experiences in question-and-answer sessions with the public. (Photo by Mark Makela/Reuters)

A view of the screen of a ZaZZZ vending machine that contains cannabis flower, hemp-oil energy drinks, and other merchandise at Seattle Caregivers, a medical marijuana dispensary, in Seattle, Washington February 3, 2015. Vending machines selling medical marijuana opened for business in Seattle on Tuesday, in what the company providing them billed as a first-in-the-state innovation that it expects to expand to other cities and states where pot is legal as medicine. (Photo by David Ryder/Reuters)

An Iraqi special forces Counter Terrorism Service (CTS) member screams during a battle against Islamic State group jihadists (IS) in Mosul's al-Rifaq neighbourhood on January 8, 2017, as an ongoing military operation against the militants continues. Elite Iraqi forces battling the Islamic State group in eastern Mosul reached the Tigris River that splits the city in two for the first time, a spokesman said. (Photo by Dimitar Dilkoff/AFP Photo)