Alaska is so large that it could contain Texas, California, and Montana combined and still have room left over — at more than 663,000 square miles, it dwarfs every other state by a wide margin. Texas is a distant second at roughly 268,600 square miles, followed by California, Montana, and New Mexico to round out the top five.

Size does not track with population. Alaska ranks first in land area but sits near the bottom in people per square mile, while much smaller states like New Jersey and Rhode Island are packed far more densely. That gap between land area and population is one of the more useful things this quiz teaches.

The rest of the top ten — Arizona, Nevada, Colorado, Oregon, and Wyoming — are almost all western states, a reminder that the country's largest land areas sit far from the crowded East Coast corridor where most Americans actually live.

This quiz rewards players who can separate 'big on a map' from 'big in population,' a distinction that comes up constantly once you start comparing states on more than one dimension.

Land area alone doesn't tell the whole story either. Once you add in state waters, Michigan climbs several spots up the rankings because its borders reach deep into the Great Lakes. At the opposite extreme, Rhode Island is the smallest state in the country at just over 1,200 square miles — Alaska could fit more than 500 Rhode Islands within its own borders.

Texas likes to call itself the biggest state in the contiguous 48, and by land area that claim holds up — it's more than twice the size of California, the next-largest state outside Alaska, and larger than every country in Western Europe.