Name a country with 'Democratic' in its official name

The answers, by rarity

How the crowd plays it

The crowd's reflex here is "Democratic Republic of the Congo" — correct, instant, and worth a Plankton 10. The second reflex, "North Korea", belongs to the Too Clever tier: it sounds like a deep cut and lands like a cliché, because every confident player reaches for it in the same second.

Swim past the school and the ladder thins out fast: "Laos" earns a Deep Cut 85, the mark of a player who reads second pages. The trench floor of this prompt is "São Tomé and Príncipe" — one banked answer, 100 points, no company.

Playing this prompt backwards

When this question surfaces in a dive, your 25 seconds are best spent in reverse: first, name the Plankton answer silently and let it go; second, refuse the Too Clever answer unless the clock is dying; third, search your second page — the runner-up, the older one, the one from the smaller place. In geography, that means remembering that think of the atlas backwards: instead of asking 'what do I know?', ask 'what does everyone else know?' — then sail past it. The first three countries anyone names are Plankton. The ones you have to picture on a map before you can spell them are where the depth is.

This prompt appears in the daily rotation, in Unlimited mode and — drilled on its own category — in the Geography pack. Its full answer bank is also published whenever its day closes, in the archive.