US Map / US Map Quiz / Northeast States Quiz

Northeast States Map Quiz

Nine states, clicked on the map as they are named — the corner of the country that costs most people their perfect score.

Learn them as a chain, not a cloud

The Northeast is where full-map scores collapse, and the reason is scale rather than ignorance: all six New England states together cover about 63,000 square miles, less than half of Montana, and five of the nine states in this deck would fit inside Iowa. The reliable trick is to run them as a sequence down the coast rather than to hunt for shapes: Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Vermont. Maine is unmistakable at the top. Vermont and New Hampshire are the vertical pair below it and the two most often swapped — Vermont is the western one, widest along its Canadian border and narrowing southward, with Lake Champlain down its northwestern flank; New Hampshire is the eastern one, widest at the bottom, with 18 miles of Atlantic coast. Massachusetts is the one with Cape Cod hooking out to sea, Rhode Island is the small block on its southeast corner, and Connecticut squares off the bottom of New England.

Then the three that carry the population

New York lies west of all of New England, touching Vermont, Massachusetts and Connecticut along that edge, and reaches the Atlantic only at its southeastern tip through Long Island; New Jersey hangs south of it between the Hudson and the Delaware; Pennsylvania is the wide rectangle underneath, notched at its northwest corner where it reaches Lake Erie. Once those three are placed, the six New England states have nowhere else to be. The Northeast region page lists all nine with their capitals and divisions, and the New England and Mid-Atlantic pages split them the way the Census does — six in New England, three in the Mid-Atlantic, which is the split most people already carry in their heads without knowing the Census uses it too. Note that Delaware and Maryland are not in this deck: both look northeastern on a map, but the Census counts them as Southern states.

The rest of the series

Every deck on the site scores as you answer and reshuffles on reload. There is the full 50-state map quiz for all 50 in one round; the capitals quiz for multiple choice on every state capital; the abbreviations quiz for the two-letter postal codes; the easiest-states deck for fifteen outlines you can spot on sight; the hardest-states deck for the twenty that decide your score; and one region at a time — Midwest, South, West.