Islands of the South Pacific

Anyone who has ever glanced at a map of the South Pacific would surely agree that this is a prime candidate for the Armadillo Award.

(For the benefit of those who are not directly involved in Macclesfield Quiz League: the Armadillo Award goes to the worst, or most obscure question of the season.)

Even at the best of times, I do not like questions that require you to visualise places on a map. For example: "If you sailed west from San Francisco, what's the first country you would come to?" (Answer: Japan.)

I don't like this sort of question because I don't carry this sort of information around in my head. It's just not the way my brain works; I don't know about anyone else's.

Here is a map of the South Pacific, found at random on the Internet.

Remember that we're talking about distances of 1,100 miles (Fiji to New Zealand) and 2,775 miles (Fiji to Honolulu).

Within 500 miles of Fiji you have Tonga and Samoa. As far as I can measure on my map, the distances for Tonga are exactly the same; Samoa, I reckon, is about 1,600 miles from New Zealand and 2,300 miles from Hawaii.

Slightly further away you have Tuvalu and Vanuatu; then Kiribati and the Solomon Islands. Finally, about 1,700 miles from Fiji you have the Marshall Islands.

These are only the major island groups in this part of the world. I haven't mentioned groups like the Cook Islands, Tokelau or the Phoenix Islands.

I can't be bothered to work out how far all these island groups are from New Zealand or Hawaii. I'll just cite one more example: the Marshall Islands are about 2,800 miles from New Zealand and 2,300 miles from Hawaii.

The question has absolutely nothing to distinguish Fiji from Tonga or Samoa, apart from the slight difference in the distances in the case of Samoa. Even for the Marshall Islands, the distances are not an order of magnitude away from those for Fiji.

Are we supposed to carry all these figures around in our heads? Are we supposed to remember the distances from each one of these groups of islands to every other point on the globe that the question setter might happen to pick?

The best that can be said for this question is "at least you can have a guess". But as I've said before, it's not supposed to be about guessing; it's supposed to be about what you know.