Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, November 15, 1993 TAG: 9311160270
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 6 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE:
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
70-75 points. A geography genius. Either that or you're one of those people who read the newspaper from back to front, so you saw the answers first.
55-69 points. You qualify as an official Virginia tour guide. You obviously know your way around. Either that, or your head's simply stuffed full of trivia, too.
40-54 points. You can find your way around, although you don't know what you're missing. Don't feel bad, though - depending, of course, on which ones you missed. Heck, most of us never heard of Abkhazia, either.
20-39 points. The good news is, you do know some geography. The bad news is, the map you're working from still lists the Austria-Hungarian Empire.
10-19 points. Your problem is you think Rand McNally was a shortstop for the Brooklyn Dodgers.
Under 10 points. Pull out the map in your glove compartment. You do have a map there, right? Take a look at the ocean. Does it show dragons and sea monsters at the edge?
ANSWERS
National and international
1. Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania.
2. Gaza Strip, West Bank, Golan Heights.
3. New York, Los Angeles, Chicago.
4. Abkhazia.
5. Turkey, Syria, Iran.
6. Georgia
7. Kuriles.
8. Kalingrad is the enclave. Poland and Lithuania are the neighbors.
9. Dinaric Mountains.
10. Haiti.
11. Dominican Republic.
12. Haiti.
13. Paris.
14. Iraq.
15. California (which picked up seven seats), Florida (four), and Texas (three).
16. New York, which lost three seats.
17. Guyana.
18. The Mackenzie-Peace river system in Canada.
19. Aral Sea.
20. Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan.
Virginia
1. 460 miles.
2. Five: North Carolina, Tennessee, Kentucky, West Virginia, Maryland.
3. Shenandoah Valley.
4. Breaks Interstate Park on the Virginia-Kentucky border. The Virginia portion is in Dickenson County. The river in question is the Russell Fork.
5. The fall line.
6. The coastal plain, the Piedmont, the Blue Ridge, and the ridge and valley.
7. Find the Chesapeake Bay.
8. Charleston and Miami.
9. Two: Lake Drummond in the Great Dismal Swamp and Mountain Lake in Giles County.
10. The Cumberland Gap.
11. Mount Rogers - 5,719 feet above sea level.
12. Sharp Top, at the Peaks of Otter.
13. The Shenandoah Valley, generally. More specifically, a hollow in Shenandoah County known as Fort Valley.
14. Don't forget the Eastern Continental Divide: The water falling on the western half of Craig flows eventually into the Gulf of Mexico, the water falling on the eastern half flows toward the Atlantic Ocean.
15. Berkeley County and Jefferson County, in West Virginia.
16. Near Mount Rush in Buckingham County.
17. 95 counties and 41 cities.
18. Lee County.
19. Caves are formed where there is karst geology, a fancy way of saying limestone. That's only found in Western Virginia.
20. Near Richmond.
21. Uranium.
22. Tangier Island, in the middle of the Chesapeake Bay.
23. Berkeley County and Jefferson County, same as question 15.
24. A railroad - in those days, the Baltimore & Ohio, the main link between Baltimore and the Midwest. Virginia officials had fought for years to keep the B&O from being built - they feared the railroad would divert traffic from the port of Hampton Roads - so West Virginia officials wanted to make sure not a single rail was left under the Old Dominion's control.
25. They were all boomtowns that sprang up after railroads came through Western Virginia.
26. Both were the sites of major salt licks.
27. The lead mines at Fort Chiswell in Wythe County that produced bullets for the American revolutionaries.
28. Salt, at Saltville, a product then in shore supply in the Confederacy.
29. Big Walker Mountain Tunnel and the East River Tunnel.
30. They followed the mountains and the valleys, which run diagonally from Pennsylvania into the Shenandoah Valley.
31. Detroit.
32. Wheeling. Remember: Virginia still ran to the Ohio River then.
33. Dickenson County, formed in 1880.
34. Arlington used to be part of the District of Columbia. In 1791, both Virginia and Maryland ceded land to the new federal government for a national capital. The government set up shop on the Maryland side. By 1846, the federal government decided Virginia's land wouldn't be needed, so it gave Arlington back. Give yourself extra points if you knew that in those days Arlington was known as Alexandria County.
35. Burkes Garden, in Tazewell County.
36. The chestnut.
37. Flat Top is 4,001 feet above sea level. Sharp Top is 3,875 feet. It's only an optical illusion that makes Sharp Top, which, as its name implies, is pointier, appear taller.
38. The Roanoke River, 380 miles long to the James' 340 miles.
39. Jacob Hevener's barn at Hightown in Highland County. The water the runs off one sideof the roof flows into the Potomac, the water draining off the other side into the James' watershed.
40. It's the state line between Virginia and Tennessee.
41. From the ``narrows'' of the New River.
42. Eight: West Virginia, Kentucky, Ohio, Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Wisconsin and part of Minnesota.
43. The Maury River.
44. Natural Tunnel.
45. It flows from south to north. We'll also give credit to those who say it's the second-oldest river in the world, although that claim has recently been called into question.
46. Pennsylvania, because the Susquehanna River drains into the Chesapeake Bay. Technically speaking, the bay is simply a flooded stretch of the Susquehanna.
47. Purgatory Mountain.
48. Afton Mountain.
49. Cambria.
50. A route through Lynchburg and Roanoke.
51. Ingalls Field, in Bath County.
52. 2.5 percent.
53. The corridor of urbanized localities that starts in Northern Virginia, runs along Interstate 95 to Richmond, then swings east along Interstate 64 to Hampton Roads.
54. The Mississippi River.
55. Coal.
by CNB