In this piece from June 2022 I mentioned a JetPunk quiz which gives you 15 minutes to list 196 countries: the 193 sovereign states recognized by the UN and three others which are not officially recognized as countries (Vatican City, Kosovo and Taiwan). My daughter had spent much of the most recent half-term holiday taking this quiz and improving her knowledge of world geography.

For a few weeks that summer I spent time on this challenge, and many others on the JetPunk site, improving my knowledge of (among other things) flags, UK counties and countries sorted by population size. I also attempted this Jetpunk quiz: Countries by First and Last Two Letters. You are presented with a map of the world, each country appearing in a mix of red and blue. As the brief instructions tell you:

“In 90 seconds, make every country disappear from the map by typing both its first 2 letters and its last 2 letters.

Typing the first two will remove the blue-shaded shape, typing the last two will remove the red-shaded shape.”

The highest score available is 392: the 2-letter combinations at the start and end of all 196 place names. The most common combination is “IA”, which appears at the end of 38 country names, followed by “AN”, which appears at the end of 16 country names and at the start of three others (19 in total).

In 2022 I attempted this challenge many times and wondered if it was even possible to get a score of 392 in 90 seconds. I analyzed the 2-letter combinations and worked out that there were 144 of them, 288 characters in all. When I learnt to touch type, typing speeds in words per minute (wpm) were calculated on the basis of 5-letter words. A speed of 60wpm means that you are typing 300 words in a minute, so anyone with a speed of 50wpm should easily be able to type 288 characters in 90 seconds.

I tried various ways to achieve this, including recording the 144 combinations and playing it back, but I could never keep up, and gave up on this method. I have used various mnemonics to memorize the 193 countries of the world, but on this challenge I could still never get a score higher than 381/392. On that occasion I made a note of the 11 combinations that I didn’t manage to type in time: UA (Nicaragua), RA (Andorra), AZ (Azerbaijan), CR (Croatia), JO (Jordan), UG (Uganda), UM (Belgium), RW (Rwanda), WE (Zimbabwe), EQ (Equatorial Guinea), WI (Malawi).

I have returned to the quiz and worked out a way to type all 144 combinations and get a score of 392/392 consistently. It involved turning the 2-letter combinations into words, spread out over 18 lines of text. Some of the words are meaningless, and most of the 18 phrases that they create are meaningless too. I experimented with the order of the words and phrases and settled on the order that appears at the end of this piece. I wrote them out by hand, multiple times, and when I had finished told my daughter about it. I explained that if she comes across an A4 page with weird expressions on it, like “Viva Pope Koalaz” and “Joshua weds Yemeni”, it’s all to do with this JetPunk challenge. In fact, my finalized lists reflect whether the 2-letter combination appears at the start of a name (capitalized first letter) or not (both letters in lower case), so those two phrases in the last sentence are written as: “ViVa PoPe KoAlAz” and “Joshua weds YeMeNi”.

If you can type the following 18 phrases, averaging less than 5 seconds per line, you too will be able to get full marks (392/392) on this JetPunk challenge.

ChEquergus jiHaDopt

CrumMy SlIvEr CzEcKiCe

SaFe Groany ToKyorItty

Uz RuSiia Land

CaNada IsraEl CoMoRoSo

AfGhAn Iraq

Very wiSe AutistIc adam

QaTaRwas BaRe Ugly

JaDe SwIngoya

ViVa PoPe KoAlAz

BeLize BrUnei LuKaKu

PhonEtOm Uk

ZiGe ZaGa GuEsTuBu

PaCy BoBhay CuSrEg

MaThSuNo TrosSy

FrilLeDjAr SpEaKerken

FiNe HoUr Huey divo

Joshua weds YeMeNi