A Global Perspective

The world is really at your fingertips. With the click of a mouse, you can get the details on Djibouti or the lowdown on Laos.

Starting simply, you’ll find a fairly complete representation of the worldat https://atlas.dhs.org/RealWorld/Applicatio/WorldAtlas. This site breaks down the continents into the countries they comprise. You also can click on individual countries for more detail. Other than telling you what’s where, the site isn’t all that exciting.

A bit more thrilling is the CIA’sWorld Factbook, at https://www.odci.gov/cia/publications/factbook. At the bottom of the Web page, there’s a link to chiefs of state, listing the major government players around the world.

At https://www.internetgeographer.co.uk, you can test your knowledge in a game of “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?” as a single player or against a friend. You can choose your area of interrogation. If you’re not really about fun and games, there’s straight information available on the site too.

If you’re fixated on the European Union, https://www.lib.berkeley.edu/gssi/eu.html has links to everything you could possibly want.

Maybe you’re fixated on Yugoslavia. Well, you’ve got a bit of catching up to do. Check out https://www.odci.gov/cia/publications/balkan/regter.html for political maps of the Balkans.

OK, cartography nut, this one’s for you. At https://www.library.yale.edu/MapColl/curious.html, you can find the rather quirky holdings in the Yale Map Collection. And for city dwellers, there’s a link to historical city maps of the U.S. and Europe.

Another fine institution, University of Texas (https://www.lib.utexas.edu/maps/map_sites/country_sites.html), offers links to the various maps available online. Some of the maps also list the year they were made, which can be helpful because borders have been far from static in the last decade.

Afghanistan is one country whose borders are fairly familiar these days, but what about Andorra? No, it’s not a moon from “Star Wars.” You can get myriad maps of that and other countries at https://www.embassyworld.com/maps, which serves as a geography portal.

Maps.com, at https://www.maps.com/explore, offers an online atlas that includes political and topographical maps covering seven continents, 12 regions, 190 countries and America’s 50 states. The site also has fact books, currency converters and weather maps. The site will give you the current time in all zones across the globe. And you can check topography maps to see whether you’ll actually be going over a river and through the woods to grandmother’s house in Montpelier.

Although many users know MapQuest mostly for domestic trips and directions, you’ll find a display of the globe at https://www.mapquest.com/cgi-bin/ia_find?link=school/ worldatlas_index&atlas;=world. You can check out country profiles. For instance, you can learn that Eritrea, which is slightly larger than Pennsylvania, faces desertification, overgrazing and loss of infrastructure from civil warfare.

At https://www.countrywatch.com, headlines from all over the world shoot across the screen. When you select a country, the site calls up a map, area-specific news and statistics ranging from agriculture to population to economy.

In addition, CountryWatch lists bordering countries and lets you click on information directly.

For students of all ages, there’s https://school.discovery.com/homeworkhelp/worldbook/atozgeography. If you click “Q,” for instance, you’ll get everything from Qatar to Qwaqwa. Although the other sites help you fill in the figurative blanks about the world, you can literally fill in the blanks with outlines printable from https://geography.about.com/cs/blankoutlinemaps.

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Michelle Maltais is a broadcast producer and copy editor at The Times. She can be reached at michelle.maltais@latimes.com.