80 Fun Facts About Trivia for 10 Year Olds

Which planet is the hottest in the Solar System?

Mercury is closer to the Sun, but Venus's thick atmosphere traps heat like a blanket, so its surface is hot enough to melt lead.

Which is the smallest planet in the Solar System?

Mercury is only a little bigger than our Moon and races around the Sun in just 88 days.

In 2006, Pluto was officially reclassified as what kind of object?

Pluto is smaller than Earth's Moon, and it shares its neighbourhood with lots of other icy bodies in the Kuiper belt.

A light-year is a unit used to measure what?

It is how far light travels in one year, which is nearly six trillion miles.

Which scientist used his own telescope to spot the four largest moons of Jupiter?

Those four moons are still called the Galilean moons: Io, Europa, Ganymede and Callisto.

Dinosaurs died out in a mass extinction roughly how many million years ago?

Birds are the only dinosaur family that survived, so the pigeons in the park are technically living dinosaurs.

What is the largest organ of the human body?

It makes up about 16% of your body weight and completely replaces its outer layer about once a month.

How many permanent (adult) teeth does a person usually have?

Kids have 20 baby teeth, and the last four adult teeth, the wisdom teeth, often do not show up until your late teens.

A shark's skeleton is made of which material instead of bone?

Cartilage is the same bendy stuff that is in your nose and ears, and it is about half as dense as bone.

Dolphins live in the sea, but which group of animals do they belong to?

Like all mammals they breathe air, so a dolphin has to come to the surface through its blowhole.

Which is the smallest bird in the world?

It is only about two and a half inches long and weighs less than a penny.

Sloths are famous for which quality?

They move so slowly that algae grows on their fur, which helps them hide among the leaves.

What is the name for hot melted rock once it flows out of a volcano?

While it is still underground it is called magma; the moment it reaches the surface, the name changes.

Earthquakes happen mostly because of movement in what?

Earth's outer shell is broken into huge slabs that grind past each other, and the shaking is energy released along the cracks.

The Titanic sank on its very first voyage after hitting an iceberg. In which year?

It was the biggest ship in the world at the time and was sailing from England to New York.

Machu Picchu, the mountaintop city in Peru, was built by which people?

It sits about 8,000 feet up in the Andes and was never found by the Spanish, which is why it survived so well.

The Taj Mahal is in which country?

It is a white marble tomb built by an emperor for his wife, and it took about 20 years to finish.

The Colosseum, the giant ancient arena, is in which city?

It could hold around 50,000 spectators, and it is still the largest amphitheatre ever built.

The famous clock tower nicknamed Big Ben stands in which city?

Big Ben is really the name of the huge bell inside; the tower itself was renamed the Elizabeth Tower in 2012.

What is the capital city of Japan?

Kyoto was the capital for more than a thousand years before the emperor moved to Tokyo in 1868.

What is the capital city of Australia?

Sydney and Melbourne both wanted the job, so a brand-new capital was built between them.

What is the capital city of Canada?

Toronto is much bigger, but Ottawa was chosen partly because it was safely far from the US border.

Most of the Amazon rainforest is in which country?

About 60% of it is in Brazil, and it holds an estimated 390 billion trees.

What is the smallest country in the world?

It fits inside the city of Rome and has fewer than 1,000 people living in it.

Which is the biggest coral structure in the world, made up of about 2,900 separate sections?

It is made of about 2,900 separate reefs and is so big it can be seen from space.

Anne Frank wrote her famous diary while hiding from the Nazis in which city?

She and her family hid in a secret annex behind her father's office for just over two years.

Helen Keller, who could neither see nor hear, was the first deafblind American to do what?

Her teacher Anne Sullivan spelled words into her hand, and Keller went on to write books and give speeches around the world.

Which artist painted the Mona Lisa?

He worked on it for years and never handed it over to the family who ordered it.

Which famous ceiling in Rome did Michelangelo paint?

He spent about four years painting scenes from the Book of Genesis while standing on scaffolding with his head tipped back.

Mozart could already play keyboard and violin, and had begun composing, by which age?

He was performing for kings and queens as a small child and wrote more than 800 pieces before he died at 35.

Composer Ludwig van Beethoven kept writing music even after losing which sense?

He wrote some of his most famous works, including the Ninth Symphony, when he was almost completely deaf.

The Beatles came from which English city?

They played hundreds of shows in Liverpool's Cavern Club before they became famous around the world.

Which singer is known as the King of Pop?

His album Thriller is one of the best-selling albums ever made.

Whose Eras Tour became the highest-grossing concert tour of all time?

The tour lasted almost two years, and the concert film made from it also set a record.

Who has won more Academy Awards than any other person, with 22?

Many of them were for short cartoons, and in 1939 he got one full-size Oscar plus seven tiny ones for Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.

Which 1995 movie was the first feature film made entirely with computer animation?

It was also Pixar's first movie, and Woody and Buzz have now starred in five of them.

In Frozen, Anna and Elsa are princesses of which kingdom?

The kingdom's look was based on Norway, right down to the fjords and the wooden churches.

Which talkative animal is Shrek's sidekick?

Donkey is voiced by Eddie Murphy, and he ends up marrying the dragon that guarded Fiona's tower.

In The Lion King, what is the name of Simba's father?

Scar is Mufasa's brother, which makes him Simba's uncle.

The magical Madrigal family in Encanto lives in which country?

Mirabel is the only Madrigal who never received a magical gift, and the family's house is alive.

SpongeBob SquarePants lives in which underwater city?

He lives in a pineapple next door to Squidward and works at the Krusty Krab.

Pikachu is which type of Pokémon?

The red pouches on its cheeks store the electricity it shoots at opponents.

In the Percy Jackson books, which Greek god is Percy's father?

That is why Percy can breathe underwater and talk to horses, which Poseidon created.

What is Spider-Man's real name?

He got his powers as a teenager after being bitten by a radioactive spider.

In the Nintendo games, how is Luigi related to Mario?

Luigi wears green, is a little taller than Mario, and is famously scared of ghosts.

Minecraft was created by a game company from which country?

Mojang started as a tiny studio in Stockholm; Microsoft bought it in 2014 for $2.5 billion.

In which year was Roblox first released to the public?

It was already more than a decade old by the time it became one of the world's most-played games during 2020.

Which company makes Fortnite?

Epic also makes the Unreal Engine, the software behind many other games and movie effects.

In Among Us, what are the secret players who sabotage the crew called?

The game came out in 2018 but only became a worldwide hit two years later.

The Lego company is based in which country?

The name comes from the Danish words leg godt, meaning play well.

The Rubik's Cube was invented in 1974 by a professor from which country?

Ernő Rubik built it to teach 3D shapes to his architecture students, and it took him a month to solve his own puzzle.

Which toy company makes Barbie?

Barbie was created by Ruth Handler and named after her daughter Barbara; she first went on sale in 1959.

The card game Uno was invented in 1971 in which US state?

Merle Robbins, a barber, invented it and first sold copies out of his shop.

Scrabble was invented in 1931 by a man with which job?

Alfred Butts counted letters on the front page of The New York Times to decide how many of each tile to include.

The first jigsaw puzzles, made around 1760, were cut from what?

They were made to teach children geography, one country per piece.

Who invented the World Wide Web in 1989?

He gave it away for free, so no one has to pay to build a website.

In which year was YouTube founded?

Its three founders had all worked at PayPal, and Google bought the site the very next year.

In which year was the very first iPhone announced?

It had no app store at first, and it could not even copy and paste text.

Google was founded in 1998 by Larry Page and which other computer scientist?

The two met as students at Stanford and started the company in a friend's garage.

Nintendo was started in 1889 to make what?

It made hanafuda cards for almost a century before it made its first video games.

In The Legend of Zelda games, what is the name of the land Link protects?

Link is the hero, not Zelda; she is the princess whose name is on the box.

A marathon is about how many miles long?

The distance comes from the 1908 London Olympics, when the course was stretched so it could finish in front of the royal box.

How many squares are on a chessboard?

Each player starts with 16 pieces, so exactly half the squares are full at the beginning.

How many players does each basketball team have on the court at one time?

The hoop is 10 feet off the ground, the same height James Naismith hung a peach basket in 1891.

The Summer Olympics are held every how many years?

The Winter Olympics also happen every four years, timed so they fall in between the summer games.

In ice hockey, what do players hit into the net to score?

A puck is a flat rubber disc, and it is frozen before games so it slides better and bounces less.

A full-size golf course usually has how many holes?

The number was set at St Andrews in Scotland, and many smaller courses have nine.

The Wimbledon tennis tournament is played on which surface?

It is the only one of the four Grand Slam tournaments still played on grass.

The modern pizza is often credited to Raffaele Esposito, a baker in which Italian city?

Legend says he made a red, white and green pizza for Queen Margherita in 1889, and the Margherita pizza is named after her.

The first people to fly in a hot air balloon did so in 1783 in which country?

The balloon was built by the Montgolfier brothers, and it flew for about 25 minutes over Paris.

In 1876, Alexander Graham Bell was granted the first US patent for which invention?

Several other inventors were working on the same idea, and Bell filed his paperwork just hours before a rival.

Which engineer co-founded Apple in 1976 and designed its first computer by hand?

Wozniak designed the machine and Steve Jobs did the selling; a third founder, Ronald Wayne, sold his share for $800.

Which school does Harry Potter attend?

Its full name is Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, and students get there on a train from Platform 9¾.

Who wrote Matilda and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory?

He wrote in a small shed at the bottom of his garden, sitting in an old armchair with a board across his lap.

In C. S. Lewis's Narnia books, the children first reach Narnia through which piece of furniture?

The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe was the first Narnia book published, in 1950.

Charles Darwin is famous for his theory explaining what?

He worked out his ideas after a five-year voyage on a ship called HMS Beagle.

Isaac Newton is famous for his law of universal what?

The story about an apple falling on his head is probably made up, but he did say watching an apple fall got him thinking.

What does the dinosaur name Triceratops mean?

It had two long brow horns and a shorter nose horn, plus a big bony frill, and lived about 66 to 69 million years ago.

The tower-building game Jenga gets its name from a word meaning 'to build' in which language?

Its inventor, Leslie Scott, grew up speaking Swahili in East Africa; the game uses 54 wooden blocks.

What do toucans mostly eat?

People once thought their tooth-edged bills meant they caught fish, but the big bill is mainly for reaching fruit and keeping cool.