NEW YORK — When it comes to geography, Americans can't tell Kyrgyzstan from Kansas.

Enter Roger Andresen, a former fiber-optics engineer who five years ago founded an Atlanta company called A Broader View to provide products that make geography accessible to the general public.

"Geography is a wonderful discipline to help us understand a wide variety of issues, such as international security, international resources, and international business," said Andresen, 34, whose company's signature product is a 600-piece Geography Puzzle.

His company runs an online geography contest that challenges visitors to identify 10 random countries in two minutes. Since starting the contest in 2003, the site, www.geographyzone.com, has registered more than 2.1 million contestants from 192 countries.

Andresen was inspired to quit his engineering job and start his own company in 2002, when he read the results of a survey of 18- to 24-year-olds that found that American young adults placed next to last in geographic knowledge.

A follow-up survey in 2006 was hardly more encouraging. The study, by the National Geographic Society and Roper Public Affairs, found that six in 10 of the young adults surveyed could not find Iraq on a map of the Middle East, and though the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians had been in the news their entire lives, 75 percent could not locate Israel.