1988 Trivia
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99 free 1988 trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
This 1988 trivia quiz covers the last full year of the Cold War, when the Soviets left Afghanistan, Estonia declared sovereignty and a Jamaican bobsled team turned up in Calgary. Expect questions on the Seoul Olympics and the fastest drug test in history, Iran Air 655, Piper Alpha, Lockerbie, the Morris worm, Bush versus Dukakis, Benazir Bhutto and Pinochet's lost plebiscite. Culture rounds cover Rain Man, Die Hard, Who Framed Roger Rabbit, Kirk Gibson's home run, Doug Williams' Super Bowl, the year's Nobel Prizes, the deaths of Roy Orbison, Enzo Ferrari and Richard Feynman, and the babies of 1988, from Adele and Rihanna to Stephen Curry. Early rounds suit anyone who lived through it; later rounds reward real year-by-year buffs. Every answer was checked against encyclopaedia entries before publishing.
30 of 99 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which Canadian city hosted the 1988 Winter Olympics?
Calgary
Calgary's Games ended without one official gold medal for the host, a repeat of Montreal 1976. The nearest miss came on the ice, where Brian Orser took silver behind American Brian Boitano in the 'Battle of the Brians'.
Q 02Which 1988 US number one used no instruments, only one singer's overdubbed voice?
Don't Worry, Be Happy
Don't Worry, Be Happy was all Bobby McFerrin: lead, falsetto backing, bass line and whistle, layered one take at a time. It spent two weeks at the top that autumn and won Grammys for Song and Record of the Year.
Q 03Which Soviet program reached factory floors on January 1, 1988, when a new law on state enterprises took effect?
Perestroika
Perestroika means 'restructuring'. The law, passed in 1987, let factories sell whatever they made beyond their state orders, and told them the state would no longer cover their losses.
Q 04In February 1988, Nagorno-Karabakh voted to leave which Soviet republic and join Armenia?
Azerbaijan
Azerbaijan kept the mostly Armenian enclave: its regional soviet voted 110 to 17 to ask for a transfer, and Baku and Moscow both refused. A week later, anti-Armenian riots broke out in Sumgait.
Q 05Where did an SAS team shoot dead three unarmed IRA members in Operation Flavius on March 6, 1988?
Gibraltar
Gibraltar was where the three were stopped as they walked toward the Spanish border. London first said a bomb had been planted; within a day the Foreign Secretary admitted there was no bomb and the trio were unarmed.
Q 06What happened to Aloha Airlines Flight 243 on April 28, 1988?
It lost its roof in midair
It lost its roof in midair, a long stretch of cabin ceiling peeling away over Hawaii, yet the pilots landed on Maui minutes later. Every passenger survived; the one person lost was a flight attendant swept out of the cabin.
Q 07Which Australian city hosted World Expo 88, which opened on April 30?
Brisbane
Brisbane's fair was opened by Queen Elizabeth II and ran for half a year on the south bank of the city's river. After it closed, the site was remade as South Bank Parklands.
Q 08Which country's president won a second seven-year term in May 1988 by beating his own prime minister?
France
France re-elected François Mitterrand with 54% of the vote over Jacques Chirac, the conservative prime minister he had been forced to share power with for two years.
Q 09From which country did the Soviet Army begin withdrawing on May 15, 1988?
Afghanistan
Afghanistan had tied down Soviet troops for more than eight years. April's Geneva Accords set the timetable: half the force was out by August, and the last soldiers left on February 15, 1989.
Q 10Which arms treaty came into force when Reagan and Gorbachev exchanged ratification papers at the Moscow Summit in June 1988?
The INF Treaty
The INF Treaty had been signed in Washington the previous December; swapping the ratified copies in Moscow switched it on. By 1991 it had scrapped 2,692 missiles, a whole class of nuclear weapon.
Q 11Which country won the UEFA Euro 1988 tournament hosted by West Germany?
Netherlands
Netherlands lost 1-0 to the Soviet Union in their opening game, then met the same side in the Munich final and won 2-0. Marco van Basten sealed it with a volley from an almost impossible angle.
Q 12Which NASA scientist told the US Senate in June 1988 that human-made global warming had begun?
James Hansen
James Hansen, head of NASA's Goddard Institute, told senators he was 99 percent certain the warming was real. He spoke in the middle of a drought and a Washington heat wave, and news outlets across the country carried his warning.
Q 13Which US warship shot down Iran Air Flight 655 on July 3, 1988?
USS Vincennes
Q 21Which hurricane devastated the Caribbean and Mexico's Yucatán Peninsula in September 1988?
Gilbert
Gilbert deepened explosively over the western Caribbean and was a Category 5 storm within a day. A NOAA aircraft measured 888 millibars at its centre, an Atlantic record that stood until Wilma in 2005.
Q 22Which bid won the IOC vote on September 15, 1988, to host the 1994 Winter Olympics?
Lillehammer
Lillehammer beat Anchorage, Ostersund and Sofia, two years after finishing fourth in the vote for 1992. The IOC had decided in 1986 to stop holding summer and winter Games in the same year, so these came just two years after the last.
Q 23Which Space Shuttle returned NASA to flight on September 29, 1988, after the Challenger disaster?
Discovery
USS Vincennes, an Aegis guided-missile cruiser, took the climbing Airbus for an attacking F-14 fighter. All 290 people aboard died; in 1996 Washington paid compensation but never apologised or accepted liability.
Q 14Which North Sea oil platform exploded on July 6, 1988, killing 167 people?
Piper Alpha
Piper Alpha burned for weeks until Red Adair, the American oil-well firefighter whose feats inspired a John Wayne film, put it out. Only 61 of the men on board survived.
Q 15The Fatih Sultan Mehmet Bridge, named for an Ottoman conqueror, opened in 1988 in which Turkish city?
Istanbul
Istanbul gained a second bridge between Europe and Asia, named for Mehmed the Conqueror, the sultan who took the city in 1453. Prime Minister Turgut Ozal opened it by driving the first car across the Bosphorus himself.
Q 16In which country did the 8888 Uprising against the government take place on August 8, 1988?
Burma
Burma, now Myanmar, saw nationwide strikes begin on 8-8-88, the date that named the uprising. Weeks later Aung San Suu Kyi, home to be at her sick mother's bedside, entered politics with a speech to a vast crowd at the Shwedagon Pagoda.
Q 17Which organization's founding followed a meeting of jihadi leaders including Osama bin Laden on August 11, 1988?
Al-Qaeda
The meeting came as the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan was under way.
Q 18Which Pakistani president was killed in a plane crash near Bahawalpur on August 17, 1988?
Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq
Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq had ruled since his 1977 coup. His C-130 fell minutes after take-off, killing the US ambassador too; no cause was ever proved, and one theory blamed a bomb in crates of mangoes loaded as a gift.
Q 19Which war effectively ended with a ceasefire on August 20, 1988?
The Iran-Iraq War
The Iran-Iraq War ended after eight years with the border where it had started and nothing gained by either side. Ayatollah Khomeini said accepting the UN truce was more deadly than drinking poison.
Q 20Which country's aerobatic team was involved in the Ramstein air show disaster on August 28, 1988?
Italy
Italy's Frecce Tricolori were flying their 'pierced heart', in which a solo jet flies through the point where the rest of the team cross. The soloist arrived too low and too fast, struck another jet and fell into the crowd; 70 people died.
Discovery flew mission STS-26 after a 32-month grounding, with redesigned booster joints and new pressure suits for launch. Its five astronauts were the first all-veteran American crew since Apollo 11.
Q 24Which dictator lost a national plebiscite on his rule on October 5, 1988?
Augusto Pinochet
Augusto Pinochet lost with about 56 percent voting No. The opposition had fifteen minutes of late-night television each night for a month, and filled it with a rainbow logo and a cheerful jingle promising that joy was coming.
Q 25Which team upset the Oakland Athletics to win the 1988 World Series?
Los Angeles Dodgers
Los Angeles Dodgers trailed 4-3 with two out in the ninth inning of Game 1 when Kirk Gibson, hurt in both legs, limped up to pinch-hit and homered off Oakland's star closer. It was his only plate appearance of the Series.
Q 26Which pitcher broke a 20-year-old record with 59 straight scoreless innings in 1988 and was named World Series MVP?
Orel Hershiser
Orel Hershiser passed the 58 2/3 innings set in 1968 by Don Drysdale, who by 1988 was his own club's broadcaster. Drysdale came down from the booth to congratulate him on the field.
Q 27Cornell graduate student Robert Morris released his 1988 Internet worm through which other university's computers, to hide where it came from?
MIT
MIT was only the decoy: Morris released the worm there so it would not be traced back to Cornell. He became the first person convicted under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, and later joined MIT's own faculty.
Q 28Whom did George H. W. Bush defeat in the November 1988 US presidential election?
Michael Dukakis
Michael Dukakis led the polls after his party's convention, then rode in an M1 tank to look strong on defence. Reporters laughed at the sight, and the Bush campaign turned the footage into an attack ad.
Q 29Which Soviet space shuttle made its only orbital flight on November 15, 1988?
Buran
Buran circled the Earth twice with nobody aboard and landed itself on a runway under computer control. The programme was cancelled, and in 2002 the orbiter was crushed when the roof of its hangar at Baikonur collapsed.
Q 30In which city was an independent State of Palestine proclaimed on November 15, 1988?
Algiers
Algiers was hosting the Palestine National Council, the PLO's parliament in exile, and Yasser Arafat read the declaration out to it. The text had been drafted by the poet Mahmoud Darwish.