The Proposition Race

How the country comparison quiz works

The Proposition Race borrows its idea from a word-card game on the Korean show The Community 2. You combine country cards and metric cards into a sentence of the form 'A has a [higher] [metric] than B', and real statistics decide whether it's true. Every question deals 8 fresh countries and 6 metrics, while the 6 comparatives — higher, lower, larger, smaller, longer, shorter — stay in the same place. Fill the blanks in any order; the submit button appears once all four are set. Answers aren't revealed question by question: you play all ten in one go and they're scored together at the end, so an early answer can't tip you off about a later one. The figures are the same ones used on WhatsThePop's country and comparison pages, and the results show both countries' actual values and how many times apart they are. A correct claim where the two values are less than 2× apart is marked as a close call, which separates real knowledge from simply pairing a big country with a small one.

The 13 metrics

Each question offers 6 of these 13 metrics at random. Each metric only pairs with certain comparatives.

• Land areaLand and inland water in km², excluding territorial sea.
• PopulationTotal population, from the latest World Bank estimate.
• Population densityPopulation divided by land area (people per km²).
• GDPNominal GDP — the size of the whole economy.
• GDP per capitaNominal GDP divided by population — income level, not economy size.
• Life expectancyLife expectancy at birth, in years.
• Median ageThe age of the person in the middle if everyone lined up by age.
• Urbanization rateShare of the population living in urban areas (%).
• Immigrant shareShare of residents who were born abroad (%).
• Immigrant populationNumber of foreign-born residents — an absolute count, not a share.
• Happiness scoreThe World Happiness Report score, out of 10.
• Capital temperatureThe capital's monthly average high, averaged over the year (°C).
• Capital rainfallTotal annual precipitation in the capital (mm).

Rules

1. A game is 10 questions. Each one gives you 8 countries, 6 metrics and 6 comparatives.
2. You can pick a comparative that doesn't fit the metric, but the claim is then scored false — 'a longer population' isn't English.
3. A claim is true when the two countries differ and the comparative matches which value is actually bigger. One point per true claim, out of 10.
4. Scoring happens once you've submitted all 10. Your best score per difficulty is saved in this browser only.

Data sources and collection dates

• Population, nominal GDP, GDP per capita, life expectancy, urbanization — World Bank Open Data (collected August 2026)
• Area — world-countries open dataset, based on Wikidata (collected August 2026)
• Median age — compiled by hand from the CIA World Factbook and other public sources (as of August 2026)
• Immigrant share and count — UN DESA International Migrant Stock 2024 (collected September 2026)
• Happiness score — World Happiness Report 2025 (collected July 2026)
• Capital average temperature and annual rainfall — Open-Meteo climate archive (collected August 2026)
• Population density — derived from the population and area above