129 Fun Facts About Trivia for 10 Year Olds

Which planet is the hottest in the Solar System, even though another planet sits closer to the Sun?

Venus. Its thick atmosphere traps the Sun's heat like a blanket in a runaway greenhouse effect, so the surface is hot enough to melt lead.

Which is the smallest planet in the Solar System?

Mercury. It is so small that two moons, Jupiter's Ganymede and Saturn's Titan, are actually bigger than it is.

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

A dwarf planet. Astronomers ruled in 2006 that a full planet must clear other objects from its orbit, and Pluto shares its path with many icy bodies in the Kuiper belt.

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

Distance. A light-year is how far light travels in one year, about six trillion miles, so the light you see from a star 100 light-years away set off a century ago.

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

Galileo Galilei. Seeing moons circle Jupiter in 1610 was strong evidence that not everything revolves around Earth, a serious blow to the old Earth-centred picture of the universe.

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

66 million years ago a giant asteroid struck what is now Mexico and wiped out most dinosaurs, but one branch survived as birds, so a pigeon is technically a living dinosaur.

What is the largest organ of the human body?

The skin. It never stops rebuilding itself: new cells push up from below while dead ones flake off the top, so you get a fresh outer layer roughly once a month.

Which adult teeth usually arrive last?

Wisdom teeth. The four of them complete the adult set of 32, and the name, borrowed from Latin, reflects that they arrive at an age when people are supposedly wiser.

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

Cartilage. It is the same bendy stuff found in your nose and ears, and because it is much lighter than bone it helps a shark stay afloat and save energy.

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

Mammals. Like all of them, dolphins breathe air, so they sleep with only half the brain at a time while the other half stays alert enough to surface for each breath.

Which is the smallest bird in the world?

Bee hummingbird. Found only in Cuba, it weighs about two grams, and the female lays just two eggs at a time, each about the size of a coffee bean.

Which rainforest animal often looks green because algae grows in its fur?

Sloth. Each of its long hairs has tiny grooves where algae grows, and the greenish tint helps the slow-moving animal hide among the treetop leaves.

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

Lava. Underground the same melted rock is called magma, and lava that cools very quickly hardens into obsidian, a black natural glass sharp enough that people made blades from it.

Earthquakes happen mostly because of movement in what?

Tectonic plates. These huge slabs of Earth's outer shell creep along slowly, but their rough edges get stuck, and when they finally slip free the stored energy shakes the ground.

The Titanic sank on its very first voyage while sailing from England to which city?

New York. The Titanic left Southampton, England, in April 1912 and struck an iceberg four days later, and its 20 lifeboats had room for only about half of the people on board.

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

The Inca. Their city sits nearly 8,000 feet up in the Andes, and because the Spanish invaders never found it, it is one of the few Inca sites that survived almost intact.

The Taj Mahal is in which country?

India. The Mughal emperor Shah Jahan built the white marble tomb for his wife Mumtaz Mahal, who died in 1631, and more than 20,000 workers laboured on it for about two decades.

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

Rome. The arena held about 50,000 spectators, and after earthquakes brought parts of it down, builders carted off the fallen stone to make palaces and churches elsewhere in the city.

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

London. Big Ben is really the nickname of the giant hour bell inside, and the tower itself was renamed the Elizabeth Tower in 2012 to mark Queen Elizabeth II's 60 years on the throne.

What is the capital city of Japan?

Tokyo. The city was called Edo until 1868, when the emperor moved there from Kyoto, the imperial home for over a thousand years, and it was renamed Tokyo, meaning eastern capital.

Which purpose-built city became Australia's capital as a compromise between Sydney and Melbourne?

Canberra. Neither rival would accept the other as capital, so a brand-new city was laid out between them to the winning plan of American architect Walter Burley Griffin.

Toronto is Canada's biggest city, but which city is its capital?

Ottawa. Rival cities could not agree on a capital, so the choice went to Queen Victoria, and in 1857 she picked Ottawa, a young timber town that had only just changed its name from Bytown.

Most of the Amazon rainforest is in which country?

Brazil. About 60% of the rainforest lies inside it, and the forest is fed from another continent: winds carry dust from the Sahara across the ocean, and its minerals fertilise the trees.

What is the smallest country in the world?

Vatican City. The whole country sits inside the city of Rome, ringed by old walls, and fewer than 1,000 people live in it.

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

Great Barrier Reef. It runs for well over 1,000 miles off north-east Australia, is big enough to be seen from space, and was built by tiny animals called coral polyps.

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

Amsterdam. Eight people hid for two years in a secret annex behind her father's office, and the way in was hidden behind a movable bookcase.

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

Earn a college degree. She graduated from Radcliffe College in 1904 after her teacher Anne Sullivan spelled the lectures and books into her hand, word by word.

Which artist painted the Mona Lisa?

Leonardo da Vinci. The portrait shows the wife of a Florentine silk merchant, but Leonardo never handed it over to the family, and it ended up with the king of France instead.

Which famous ceiling in Rome did Michelangelo paint?

The Sistine Chapel. He spent about four years, from 1508 to 1512, painting scenes from Genesis, and he worked standing on scaffolding with his head tipped back, not lying down as many people imagine.

Which composer was already writing music at five and playing for kings and queens as a child?

Mozart. He was composing little pieces at five, and at seven he set off with his sister on a concert tour of western Europe that lasted more than three years.

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

Hearing. He wrote some of his most famous music, including the Ninth Symphony, when almost completely deaf, and it is said a singer had to turn him around at its premiere so he could see the applause.

The Beatles came from which English city?

Liverpool. A local record-shop manager, Brian Epstein, saw them play in their home city in 1961, became their manager and won them the recording contract that launched them worldwide.

Which singer is known as the King of Pop?

Michael Jackson. His 1982 album Thriller is one of the best-selling ever made, and his backwards-gliding moonwalk became his trademark after he danced it to Billie Jean on TV in 1983.

Who played the first concert tour to earn a billion dollars?

Taylor Swift. Her Eras Tour passed a billion dollars before its first year was over, and fans danced so hard in Seattle, Los Angeles and Edinburgh that earthquake sensors picked up the shaking.

Who has won more Academy Awards than any other person in history?

Walt Disney. Many of his Oscars were for short cartoons, and in 1939 he was given a special one for Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs: one full-size statuette with seven tiny ones.

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

Toy Story. It was also Pixar's first feature film, and it took four years to make: a room full of computers ran around the clock, needing about 800,000 hours between them to draw every frame.

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

Arendelle. The film's artists travelled to Norway and based the kingdom on it, from the steep-sided fjords around the castle to rooflines borrowed from the country's medieval wooden churches.

Donkey from Shrek starts a family with which creature?

A dragon. She attacks Shrek and Donkey at first, then falls in love with Donkey, and by the end of the second movie the pair have a litter of babies that are half dragon and half donkey.

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

Mufasa. His deep voice belongs to James Earl Jones, who also voiced Darth Vader in Star Wars, and Jones was the only cast member to return for the 2019 remake.

The magical Madrigal family in Encanto lives in which country?

Colombia. The Madrigals live hidden in the country's mountains, and Disney leaned on a team of Colombian experts to get the film's clothes, plants, music and language right.

SpongeBob SquarePants lives in which underwater city?

Bikini Bottom. The show's creator, Stephen Hillenburg, was a marine biology teacher, and his sea creatures began life in a picture book he drew to teach students about tide pools.

Pikachu is which type of Pokémon?

Electric. The red sacs on its cheeks hold its electricity, and when several Pikachu gather in one place their charge can build up enough to set off a lightning storm.

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

Poseidon. As the sea god's son, Percy can breathe underwater, and he can talk to horses too, because Poseidon is the Greek god of horses as well as the sea.

What is Spider-Man's real name?

Peter Parker. A radioactive spider's bite gave him his strength and wall-climbing, but not his webs: in the comics he invented the web fluid, built the wrist shooters and sewed the costume himself.

How is Luigi related to Mario?

His younger twin. Luigi is slightly the younger of the two, yet he is taller and can jump higher, and although ghosts make him nervous he stars in his own ghost-catching games, Luigi's Mansion.

Minecraft was created by a game company from which country?

Sweden. It began as the project of one programmer, Markus Persson, known as Notch, and in 2014 Microsoft paid $2.5 billion for his Stockholm studio and the game.

Which of these hit games dates back to 2006?

Roblox. It opened in 2006, roughly a decade before any of the other three, and the games on it are built by the players themselves.

Which company makes Fortnite?

Epic Games. It also makes the Unreal Engine, software that powers many other games and even the giant video-wall sets used to film the Star Wars series The Mandalorian.

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

Impostors. The game launched in 2018 to almost no attention, and it only became a worldwide hit two years later, when people stuck at home in 2020 started playing it with friends.

The Lego company is based in which country?

Denmark. A carpenter, Ole Kirk Christiansen, began making wooden toys in the town of Billund in 1932, and he built the name from the Danish words leg godt, meaning play well.

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

Hungary is where architecture professor Ernő Rubik built his Magic Cube in 1974. Once he had scrambled it, he needed about a month to solve his own puzzle.

Which toy company makes Barbie?

Mattel co-founder Ruth Handler unveiled Barbie at a toy fair in 1959. The Handlers' own children were called Barbara and Ken, which is where the doll and her boyfriend got their names.

Uno began in 1971 as a barber's version of which older card game?

Crazy Eights is the game barber Merle Robbins reworked in Reading, Ohio, in 1971. He sold the first Uno decks from his own barbershop.

Which two Scrabble tiles score 10 points?

Q and Z score 10 because they are the rarest letters in English words. Inventor Alfred Butts, an architect, tallied letters on newspaper pages by hand to work out his tiles.

The first jigsaw puzzles, sold in England in the 1700s, were cut from what?

Maps came first: in 1700s England they were sold as "dissected maps" so children could learn geography by fitting the pieces back together. Other pictures only followed later.

Who invented the World Wide Web in 1989?

Tim Berners-Lee proposed it in 1989 so scientists at the CERN physics lab could share their work. In 1993 CERN gave the web away for free, so nobody owns it or charges a fee to use it.

Where was the very first YouTube video filmed?

A zoo: co-founder Jawed Karim posted a 19-second clip of himself in front of the elephants at San Diego Zoo in 2005. Google bought the site the following year.

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

Sergey Brin met Larry Page at Stanford University, where the pair built their search engine as a research project. They named it after a googol, the number 1 followed by 100 zeros.

Which video game company started out making playing cards?

Nintendo. Its first product, in 1889, was hanafuda, Japanese flower cards, and it still makes them.

In The Legend of Zelda games, Zelda is the princess of which land?

Hyrule is her kingdom, and the hero who keeps saving it is called Link. Zelda is not the one in the green tunic; she is the princess whose name is on the box.

A marathon is about how many miles long?

26.2 miles was the length of the 1908 Olympic course, laid out from Windsor Castle to a finish line in front of the royal box. Earlier marathons had been about 25 miles, and the odd new length stuck.

How many squares are on a chessboard?

64 squares make up the board, in eight rows of eight. Each player starts with 16 pieces, so exactly half the squares are full before the first move.

When James Naismith invented basketball in 1891, what did players shoot the ball into?

Peach baskets were nailed to the gym balcony rail, which happened to be ten feet up, still the height of a hoop today. Their bottoms were left in, so someone had to fetch the ball out after every score.

The Summer Olympics are held every how many years?

4 years separate one Summer Games from the next. The Winter Games used to share the same year, but since 1994 they have fallen halfway between, so an Olympics of some kind now comes round every two years.

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

A puck is a flat rubber disc, and spare pucks are kept frozen during games because a cold puck bounces less on the ice.

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

18 holes became the standard after St Andrews in Scotland merged some of its short holes in 1764, cutting its round from 22 holes to 18.

The Wimbledon tennis tournament is played on which surface?

Grass. The US Open and Australian Open were once played on it too, but both switched surfaces, leaving Wimbledon the only Grand Slam still on grass.

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

Naples. Legend says he baked a red, white and green pizza there for Queen Margherita in 1889 and named it after her, though historians doubt the tale.

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

France. Two months earlier, the Montgolfier brothers had sent a sheep, a duck and a rooster up at Versailles to check that flying was safe.

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

The telephone. It was a close race: rival inventor Elisha Gray lodged his own telephone design at the US patent office on the very same day Bell applied.

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

Steve Wozniak founded Apple with Steve Jobs and a third partner, Ronald Wayne, who quit within two weeks and sold his 10% share for just $800.

Which school does Harry Potter attend?

Hogwarts. Harry's uncle kept destroying the letters inviting him there, so Hagrid finally turned up to deliver the news in person.

Who wrote Matilda and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory?

Roald Dahl. At his boarding school, a chocolate company sent pupils new bars to test, and the memory later inspired Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.

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

A wardrobe. A later book, The Magician's Nephew, explains its magic: it was built from the wood of an apple tree grown from a Narnian apple.

Charles Darwin is famous for his theory explaining what?

Evolution. Darwin gathered much of his evidence on a five-year voyage around the world aboard a ship called HMS Beagle.

Isaac Newton is famous for his law of universal what?

Gravitation. The story of an apple hitting his head is probably made up, but Newton himself said that watching an apple fall got him thinking about it.

What does the dinosaur name Triceratops mean?

Three-horned face. When its horns were first dug up in 1887, the scientist who later named it mistook them for the remains of a giant bison.

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

Swahili. Inventor Leslie Scott grew up speaking it in East Africa and named the game after kujenga, the Swahili word meaning to build.

What do toucans mostly eat?

Fruit. Toucans swallow it seeds and all, then pass the seeds in their droppings, which helps replant the rainforest.

A camel's hump, often wrongly said to hold water, is actually a store of what?

Fat fills a camel's hump, giving the animal a reserve of calories to live on when there is little to eat in the desert.

A polar bear looks white, but its body under the fur is which colour, a shade that soaks up heat?

Black is the colour under all that fur, nose and lips included, and it absorbs heat while hollow outer hairs trap warmth and help the bear float.

Which sea creature has three hearts, two of them pumping blood through its gills?

The octopus has one main heart for its body and two more for its gills, and the blood they pump is rich in copper.

Flamingo chicks hatch with greyish feathers, so what turns the adult birds pink or red?

Their diet does it: pigments called carotenoids in the plankton that flamingos eat colour the feathers, and captive birds turn pale if they are not fed enough of them.

Which planet looks red from Earth because its surface is covered in rusty iron oxide dust?

Mars is nicknamed the Red Planet for that rusty dust, and so much of it hangs in the thin air that the sky looks tawny from the ground.

Which ocean giant, growing to about 30 metres long, is the largest animal known ever to have existed?

The blue whale reaches that size by eating almost nothing but krill, tiny shrimp-like animals it gulps by lunging forward with its mouth wide open.

Which flightless bird lays the largest eggs of any living bird, each weighing over 20 times a chicken's egg?

The ostrich egg weighs about 1.4 kg, yet compared with the size of the mother it is the smallest egg laid by any bird.

Which Italian city is built on more than 100 small islands linked by canals and hundreds of bridges?

Venice has no roads for cars in its historic centre, so people there get around on foot or by boat along the canals.

Which gemstone, made of pure carbon, is the hardest natural material known?

Diamond is hard enough to be used on cutting and polishing tools, yet soft grey graphite is built from exactly the same element.

Which musical instrument has 88 keys on a standard modern model, each one working a hammer inside?

The piano takes its name from the Italian pianoforte, a word built from soft and loud, because pressing a key harder makes a louder note.

Koalas sleep up to twenty hours a day and feed mostly on the leaves of which tree?

Eucalyptus leaves are low in calories and laced with toxic compounds, so the koala has this tree's menu largely to itself.

What is a baby kangaroo called while it finishes growing inside its mother's pouch?

A joey is only about the size of a lima bean when it is born, which is why it does the rest of its growing in the pouch.

Which precious metal has the chemical symbol Au, taken from its Latin name aurum?

Gold in its pure form is a soft metal that is easy to hammer into shape, and it is among the least reactive metals, so it keeps its shine instead of rusting.

Emperor penguins trek across the ice to breed during winter on which continent?

Antarctica is the only place emperor penguins live, and the father keeps the single egg warm for about two months while the mother feeds at sea.

Which gas do green plants release into the air during photosynthesis?

Oxygen is a leftover for the plant: it is set free when water is split apart using the energy of sunlight.

Which Apollo 11 commander became the first person to walk on the Moon in July 1969?

Neil Armstrong spent about two and a half hours outside on the surface with Buzz Aldrin, while the third member of the crew stayed in orbit above them.

Which galaxy, seen from Earth as a hazy band of light across the night sky, contains the Solar System?

The Milky Way holds an estimated 100 to 400 billion stars, most of them so far away that they blur together into that pale glow.

Which German-born physicist is best known for developing the theory of relativity and the equation E = mc²?

Albert Einstein won the 1921 Nobel Prize in Physics, though the award singled out his work on how light knocks electrons out of metal, not relativity.

Which bone, the only one in the thigh, is the longest in the human body?

The femur runs from the hip to the knee, and by some measures it is also the strongest bone a person has.

Which gas, lighter than air and unable to burn, is used to make party balloons float?

Helium is the second most abundant element in the universe, and the scientist who proposed it was a new element named it after the Sun.

Which ocean, named by the explorer Ferdinand Magellan, is the largest and deepest on Earth?

The Pacific, whose name means peaceful sea, covers about 32% of the whole planet, more than all the land put together.

Which ocean trench, home to a valley called the Challenger Deep, is the deepest known on Earth?

The Mariana Trench goes down nearly 11 kilometres, so its deepest point is over 2 km farther from sea level than the peak of Mount Everest.

Which desert, the largest hot desert in the world, stretches across much of northern Africa?

The Sahara covers about 9.2 million square kilometres, yet it ranks only third among all deserts, behind two frozen polar ones.

Which country, spanning eleven time zones, is the largest in the world by area?

Russia is so vast that it shares land borders with fourteen other countries.

The giant panda, a bear that feeds almost entirely on bamboo, lives wild only in which country?

China is the giant panda's only home, and the bear has a thumb-like bump on each front paw that helps it hold bamboo while it eats.

Which US state, the largest by area, is bigger than Texas, California and Montana combined?

Alaska was bought by the United States in 1867 for only $7.2 million, because its previous owner found it too distant and costly to keep.

Which US president, pictured on the five-dollar bill, issued the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863?

Abraham Lincoln issued it on New Year's Day, in the middle of the Civil War, declaring enslaved people in the rebelling states to be free.

Which ship carried the English families known as the Pilgrims across the ocean to North America in 1620?

The Mayflower spent 10 weeks at sea with 102 passengers and about 30 crew before dropping anchor near the tip of Cape Cod.

Who sparked the Montgomery bus boycott in 1955 by refusing to move from her seat?

Rosa Parks was not the first to do so: others, including 15-year-old student Claudette Colvin, had already been arrested for the same act.

Which boy pharaoh's tomb, still packed with treasure, was discovered by Howard Carter's team in 1922?

Tutankhamun's burial had been broken into at least twice soon after he was laid to rest, yet his mummy and most of the goods buried with him were still there.

Before building the first powered airplane, Orville and Wilbur Wright ran a shop that sold what?

Bicycles taught the two men that an unsteady machine can be controlled and balanced with practice, an idea they carried over to flying.

Which American pilot became the first woman to fly solo and nonstop across the Atlantic in 1932?

Amelia Earhart had first crossed that ocean in 1928 as a passenger, and the solo trip earned her the Distinguished Flying Cross.

What is the name for the change a caterpillar goes through inside a chrysalis to become a butterfly?

Metamorphosis does not wipe the slate clean: research found that an adult moth can still act on things it learned as a caterpillar.

Which Dutch artist painted The Starry Night in 1889 from the view out of his asylum room window?

Vincent van Gogh showed the scene as it looked just before sunrise, and he added a village that was not really there.

Which playwright, born and raised in Stratford-upon-Avon, wrote Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet and Macbeth?

William Shakespeare left behind some 39 plays and 154 sonnets, and he is widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language.

What do we call a word such as 'racecar' or 'madam' that reads the same backwards as forwards?

A palindrome does not have to be a word: a number, a date such as 22/02/2022 or even a whole sentence can work the same trick.

Which author, often sent to sit in the school hallway as a boy, created Captain Underpants and Dog Man?

Dav Pilkey dreamed up Captain Underpants at that hallway desk, where teachers put him for misbehaving in class.

Which food, botanically a large berry with a single big seed, is mashed to make guacamole?

Avocado gives the dip its name, which comes from a Nahuatl phrase that simply means avocado sauce.

Chocolate is a food made from the roasted and ground seeds of which tree?

Cacao seeds are called cocoa beans once they have been dried and fermented, and in some countries the pulp around them is made into juice.

In the animated film Moana, which shapeshifting demigod relies on a giant magical fish hook?

Maui stole the heart stone of the goddess Te Fiti long ago, and Moana persuades him to sail with her to help put things right.

In Minecraft, which green monster sneaks up on players in near silence and then explodes?

The Creeper began as a mistake: its maker mixed up the length and height of a pig model and kept the odd result as a monster.

In chess, which piece moves and captures only along diagonals, however far the path is clear?

The bishop can never leave the square colour it starts on, so a player's two bishops spend the whole game on different colours.

Which Soviet pilot became the first person to journey into outer space, circling Earth once in 1961?

Yuri Gagarin made the trip aboard Vostok 1, and it turned out to be the only spaceflight of his life.

Which green pigment in leaves lets plants absorb the energy of sunlight for photosynthesis?

Chlorophyll absorbs blue and red light most strongly, so the green light it uses least is what bounces back to our eyes.

Which volcano buried the ancient city of Pompeii under ash and pumice when it erupted in AD 79?

Mount Vesuvius left Pompeii under 4 to 6 metres of debris, which preserved the streets and houses like a snapshot of the day.

Which space telescope, launched into orbit in 1990, turned out to have a wrongly ground main mirror?

Hubble is named after the astronomer Edwin Hubble, and its blurry vision was put right by astronauts on a repair mission in 1993.

Which Scottish physician shared a Nobel Prize in 1945 for discovering penicillin in a mould?

Alexander Fleming made the find in 1928, and it has been called one of the greatest victories ever won over disease.

Which scientist, who discovered the elements radium and polonium, was the first woman to win a Nobel Prize?

Marie Curie named polonium after her native country, and she is the only person to win Nobel Prizes in two different sciences.

In Star Wars, which small green Jedi Master trains Luke Skywalker on the swamp planet Dagobah?

Yoda teaches Luke the ways of the Force until he dies at the age of 900, and he typically speaks with his words in an inverted order.

In Despicable Me, which supervillain is the boss of the Minions and adopts three orphan girls?

Gru once schemed to steal the Moon, but adopting Margo, Edith and Agnes turns him from villain into reformed parent.