| Great quiz. I can't believe the first comment is already someone complaining about city proper vs. metro. Official U.S. stats are not done by metro. They are done by city limits. Sporcle convention is to use city proper rather than metro, as well.
Frankly, I think that's a fair thing to do. When you start including metro, you start running into problems about which outlying cities should be part of the "metro" area. How far away is too far? As the cities expand, do you include more and more "nearby" cities? Theoretically (and practically), cities that weren't close to cities within a metro area will become closer as the member cities of the metro area expand.
A prime example of the phenomenon I'm talking about is the Phoenix metro area. It just keeps growing larger and larger at a very fast rate. Cities and areas that were not really part of the continuous "metro" area when I was a kid have since become linked to the metro area via out-of-control development. New cities sprout up around the edges of the existing metro area for the same reason. That's why the Phoenix metro area is larger than the Philadelphia metro area, but Philly is still larger as a city proper.
As for the Sporcle and U.S. Census convention, I think they are the right choice. It's much, much more consistent to use city proper. Besides, it's not changing, so I'd stop complaining about it. It's tiresome. |
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