If you think the only purpose of knowing the names of world cities is finding them in maps to travel there, you will be utterly incompetent at basic comprehension of 1) history, 2) real (not theoretical) economics, 3) sociology, 4) reading the International section of a newspaper.

Forming an understanding of those topics requires connecting the dots between various stories you read about them at different places, and for that it's essential to know at least the vague relative positions of regions where their major cities reside.

Surely it would be better to learn history, economics, sociology and to read the international section of a newspaper than to memorise cities? Knowledge of capitals and so forth is incidentally acquired by doing those other things.

Why are the capitals so important? Maybe I want to travel to Kyoto or Makati instead of Tokyo or Manila. I can see the value in knowing the countries and a little about them, but capitals aren't the entirety of a country, and knowing about them won't tell you much about the country as a whole.

I can learn about the capitals if I ever plan to go there.

Capitals are the most important part of a country (by definition). What little information could you learn about a country before knowing its capital?

Is Washington DC more important than NYC or any city in Silicon Valley? I'm not convinced that capitals are the most important city.

You can talk about the culture, economy, and history of a country without ever talking about the capital. Capitals are usually (not always) where the government sits, but that's only a small part of what you can learn about a country.

It surely has a lot of influence on economy, history (culture is a different thing in a country-continent like the USA, but most countries are the size of a state, not the Union). Is * important to understand the state of *?

Texas City^H^H Austin of Texas

Los Angeles^H^H Sacramento of California

Anchorage^H^H Juneau of Alaska

--

Edited to fix the initial bad example.

--

Screw it, USA states have their capitals assigned to the weirdest cities instead of the largest ones. No wonder that you don't understand why capitals are important to normal countries.

We definitely have an odd way of assigning importance to subdivisions of land. I live in an area where one of the "cities" is a mansion rented out for events with a few businesses and homes built to support it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl,_Georgia

> If you think the only purpose of knowing the names of world cities

Stop beating that strawman.

I never said anything about knowing a city name. I was arguing about knowing what's the capital of what.