50 Fun Facts About Fill in the Blank

Fill in the blank: The capital of Australia is ____.

Canberra was purpose-built as a compromise capital and formally named in 1913, after Sydney and Melbourne both wanted the job.

Fill in the blank: The River Danube empties into the ____.

On the way it passes through four capital cities: Vienna, Bratislava, Budapest and Belgrade.

Fill in the blank: Mount Kilimanjaro, Africa's highest peak, is in the country of ____.

The summit was renamed Uhuru Peak, Swahili for Freedom Peak, after the country formed in 1964.

Fill in the blank: The smallest sovereign state in the world by area is ____.

It covers just 44 hectares and had a population of about 882 in 2024, the smallest by people as well as land.

Fill in the blank: The Strait of Gibraltar separates Spain from ____.

One of its Arabic names, Bab al-maghrib, means Gate of the West.

Fill in the blank: Magna Carta was sealed in 1215 by King ____ of England.

It was sealed at Runnymede, near Windsor, on 15 June 1215.

Fill in the blank: The Berlin Wall fell in the year ____.

The evening of 9 November is remembered as the night the Wall came down, after East Berlin transit rules were overwhelmed.

Fill in the blank: The Great Fire of London broke out in the year ____.

It burned from Sunday 2 September to Wednesday 5 September and gutted the medieval City inside the old Roman wall.

Fill in the blank: The Treaty of Versailles was signed on 28 June ____.

The Allied blockade of Germany was kept in place for eight months after the Armistice, right into the year the treaty was signed.

Fill in the blank: The ancient city of Carthage stood in what is now ____.

Ships crossing the Mediterranean had to pass between Sicily and the Carthaginian coast, which gave the city enormous leverage.

Fill in the blank: The chemical symbol for gold is ____.

The symbol comes from the Latin aurum; Ag, the obvious rival, belongs to silver.

Fill in the blank: On the Mohs scale, the hardest natural material is ____.

Diamond packs more atoms into a given volume than any other known substance, which is why it is also the least compressible.

Fill in the blank: The organelle nicknamed the powerhouse of the cell is the ____.

The nickname was popularised by Philip Siekevitz in a 1957 Scientific American article of the same name.

Fill in the blank: The bones of the middle ear are the malleus, the incus and the ____.

In Latin the trio are the hammer, anvil and stirrup, and they are the smallest bones in the human body.

Fill in the blank: The SI unit of electric current is the ____.

It was originally defined as one tenth of the current unit in the old centimetre-gram-second system.

Fill in the blank: The 2016 Summer Olympics were held in ____.

The Games ran from 5 to 21 August 2016, though some preliminary events started on 3 August.

Fill in the blank: In tennis, a score of zero is called ____.

The word probably comes from the phrase playing for love, meaning playing for nothing.

Fill in the blank: A marathon covers ____ kilometres.

That works out to roughly 26.2 miles, and it can be run on trails as well as roads.

Fill in the blank: The Stanley Cup is awarded each year to the champion of the ____.

It is the oldest existing trophy awarded to a professional sports franchise in North America.

Fill in the blank: The overall leader of the Tour de France wears a ____ jersey.

The winners of the first several Tours wore a green armband instead of a jersey.

Fill in the blank: The 1997 film Titanic was written and directed by ____.

Cameron went on to make Avatar, and the two films spent years trading the title of highest-grossing film ever.

Fill in the blank: In The Wizard of Oz, Dorothy's dog is named ____.

In the book it is Toto who pulls back the curtain to expose the Wizard as a fake.

Fill in the blank: Black Panther rules the fictional African nation of ____.

Wakanda first appeared in Marvel comics decades before the 2018 film made it a household name.

Fill in the blank: The Godfather was adapted from a 1969 novel by ____.

Puzo co-wrote the screenplay with director Francis Ford Coppola.

Fill in the blank: The Simpsons live in the town of ____.

The show has never definitively said which state its Springfield is in, and the writers treat that as a running joke.

Fill in the blank: The Beatles formed in 1960 in the English city of ____.

They honed their act playing clubs in Liverpool and Hamburg before fame arrived.

Fill in the blank: The choral finale of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony is known as the Ode to ____.

The words come from a poem Friedrich Schiller wrote in 1785, with a few extra lines added by Beethoven himself.

Fill in the blank: Freddie Mercury was the lead vocalist of the rock band ____.

Before Queen, Mercury sang for a band called Smile alongside Brian May and Roger Taylor.

Fill in the blank: A modern piano has ____ keys.

Bosendorfer and Stuart & Sons are the rare makers who build pianos with extra keys.

Fill in the blank: Bob Marley was born in Nine Mile on the island of ____.

He formed the group that became the Wailers with Peter Tosh and Bunny Wailer in 1963.

Fill in the blank: The dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four was written by ____.

Published in June 1949, it was Orwell's ninth and final completed book.

Fill in the blank: Bilbo Baggins lives in a hobbit-hole called Bag ____.

Both Bilbo and Frodo set out from there and both eventually return, at least for a while.

Fill in the blank: Sherlock Holmes lived at 221B ____ Street.

For years the Abbey National building society employed a secretary just to answer letters addressed to Holmes.

Fill in the blank: Pride and Prejudice opens with the words 'It is a truth universally ____'.

The full sentence claims a single man with a good fortune must be in want of a wife, setting up marriage as the novel's central motif.

Fill in the blank: Don Quixote was written by ____.

It was published in two parts, in 1605 and 1615, and readers of the day saw the first as a complete one-volume book.

Fill in the blank: Sushi rice is seasoned with ____.

The seasoned rice, called shari or sumeshi, is the one defining component of sushi; raw fish is optional.

Fill in the blank: Guacamole is a dip based on ____.

The name comes from Nahuatl and literally translates as avocado sauce.

Fill in the blank: The spice saffron comes from the flower of a ____.

The red stigmas are picked from each flower by hand, which is why saffron is sold by the gram.

Fill in the blank: Tofu is made by pressing the curds of coagulated ____ milk.

One origin theory says it was discovered by accident when a slurry of ground soybeans met impure sea salt.

Fill in the blank: Hummus is a Levantine dip made from mashed ____.

The classic recipe blends them with tahini, lemon juice and garlic, and the standard garnish is olive oil, parsley and paprika.

Fill in the blank: The largest animal known to have ever existed is the ____.

Confirmed specimens reach about 30 metres and weigh up to 200 tonnes.

Fill in the blank: A young kangaroo is called a ____.

Adult males go by bucks, boomers, jacks or old men, and females are does, flyers or jills.

Fill in the blank: The fastest land animal is the ____.

It can hit 93 to 104 km/h and will run down a pronghorn even with a 137-metre head start.

Fill in the blank: The flightless kiwi bird is native to ____.

DNA studies suggest kiwi are closer kin to Madagascar's extinct elephant birds than to the moa they shared their islands with.

Fill in the blank: An octopus has ____ hearts.

One systemic heart pumps blood around the body while two branchial hearts push it through the gills.

Fill in the blank: The World Wide Web was invented by ____.

He also created HTML, the URL system and HTTP, and still oversees the Web through the W3C.

Fill in the blank: The first iPhone went on sale in the United States in June ____.

It cost $499 for the 4 GB model and $599 for 8 GB, and both required a two-year contract.

Fill in the blank: The programming language ____ was created by Guido van Rossum.

He began it in the late 1980s at CWI in the Netherlands as a successor to a language called ABC.

Fill in the blank: Nintendo was founded in the year ____.

Fusajiro Yamauchi started the company to make handmade hanafuda playing cards, decades before video games existed.

Fill in the blank: Bluetooth technology is named after a 10th-century king of ____.

Engineer Jim Kardach proposed the codename after reading about King Harald Bluetooth in a history of the Vikings, and it stuck.