2010s Trivia
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120 free 2010s trivia questions with answers — pop culture quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
The 2010s were the decade the smartphone took over. Instagram, Snapchat, Vine and TikTok all arrived, the iPad launched, and a Korean pop video became the first thing on YouTube to be watched a billion times. These 62 free 2010s trivia questions cover the whole decade: the Arab Spring and Brexit, the Higgs boson and the first photo of a black hole, Superstorm Sandy and the Chilean miners, Leicester City at 5000-1, the Cubs ending 108 years of waiting, the Ice Bucket Challenge, the dress, Harambe and fidget spinners, plus Adele, Frozen, Hamilton, Game of Thrones and Avengers: Endgame. The quiz covers trivia from 2010 to 2020 and is written for anyone who lived through the decade and wants to see how much stuck. Easy questions ask which company bought Instagram; harder ones ask what the Chilean rescue capsule was called or which yacht carried Greta Thunberg across the Atlantic. It works for a pub quiz round, a family night, or a 2010s-themed party. Every answer has been checked against Wikipedia and primary records, and each question shows its explanation and source once you answer.
30 of 120 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01On May 2, 2011, Osama bin Laden was killed by US special forces in which Pakistani city?
Abbottabad
Abbottabad is a garrison city north of Islamabad; bin Laden's compound stood roughly a mile from the Pakistan Military Academy. The Navy SEAL raid was codenamed Operation Neptune Spear.
Q 02How many Chilean miners were rescued in October 2010 after 69 days trapped at the San José mine?
33
All 33 miners were winched out one at a time on 13 October 2010, 69 days after the 5 August collapse, with an estimated billion people watching live.
Q 03What was the name of the steel capsule that lifted the Chilean miners to the surface one at a time?
Fénix
Fénix means phoenix; the Fénix 2 capsule was just 54 centimetres across.
Q 04What maximum rating did the 2011 Fukushima Daiichi accident receive on the International Nuclear Event Scale?
7
Only Chernobyl in 1986 had previously been rated a Level 7 major accident.
Q 05In the June 2016 referendum, what share of UK voters chose to leave the European Union?
51.9%
Leave took 51.9% of the vote, about 17.4 million ballots, against 48.1% for Remain; David Cameron, who had called the referendum, announced his resignation the next morning.
Q 06On 4 July 2012, CERN announced the discovery of a new particle consistent with which long-predicted one?
The Higgs boson
The Higgs boson, proposed in 1964, is the particle of the field that gives elementary particles mass; Peter Higgs and François Englert shared the 2013 Nobel Prize in Physics after CERN's ATLAS and CMS experiments confirmed it.
Q 07LIGO's first direct detection of gravitational waves, in 2015, came from the merger of what?
Two black holes
Two black holes of roughly 36 and 29 solar masses merged to produce GW150914, detected on 14 September 2015 and announced in February 2016, confirming a prediction Einstein made in 1916.
Q 08Which NASA spacecraft flew past Pluto on July 14, 2015, returning the first close-up images?
New Horizons
New Horizons passed about 12,500 km above Pluto's surface on 14 July 2015, nine and a half years after launch, and went on to fly by the Kuiper Belt object Arrokoth on 1 January 2019.
Q 09NASA's Curiosity rover, lowered by a 'sky crane', landed in which Martian crater in 2012?
Gale
Gale crater, with the 5-km-high Mount Sharp at its centre, received Curiosity on 6 August 2012; the sky-crane descent stage lowered the car-sized rover on a tether, then flew off to crash.
Q 10Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 vanished on 8 March 2014 while flying from Kuala Lumpur to which city?
Beijing
The Boeing 777 was bound for Beijing with 239 people aboard when it vanished from air-traffic-control radar under an hour after take-off; a flaperon that washed up on Réunion in July 2015 was the first confirmed debris.
Q 11The cruise ship Costa Concordia capsized in January 2012 after striking rocks off which Italian island?
Giglio
Giglio, a small Tuscan island, is where the Costa Concordia struck rocks on 13 January 2012; 32 people died, and Captain Francesco Schettino was later sentenced to 16 years for manslaughter.
Q 12Jorge Mario Bergoglio, elected pope in March 2013, was the first pope from which religious order?
The Jesuits
The Jesuits (Society of Jesus) had never produced a pope before Francis, who was also the first from the Americas; he was elected after Benedict XVI became the first pope in nearly 600 years to resign.
Q 13A fire on 15 April 2019 destroyed the roof and spire of which Paris landmark?
Notre-Dame Cathedral
Q 21Who scored Germany's extra-time winner against Argentina in the 2014 World Cup final?
Mario Götze
Mario Götze, a substitute, chested down André Schürrle's cross and volleyed home in the 113th minute, giving Germany the first European victory at a World Cup held in the Americas.
Q 22Leicester City won the 2015-16 Premier League after starting the season at what odds with bookmakers?
5000-1
Bookmakers had priced Leicester at 5000-1 in August 2015; Claudio Ranieri's side clinched the title on 2 May 2016 when Tottenham drew 2-2 at Chelsea.
Q 23The Chicago Cubs won the 2016 World Series, their first title since which year?
1908
The Cubs' previous championship came in 1908, a 108-year drought; the deciding seventh game in Cleveland went to ten innings after a 17-minute rain delay, and Ben Zobrist's go-ahead double helped win it by one run.
Notre-Dame Cathedral lost its nineteenth-century spire shortly before 8 pm that evening; it reopened in December 2024 after a five-year rebuild.
Q 14The Ice Bucket Challenge that swept social media in summer 2014 raised money to fight which disease?
ALS
It raised more than $115 million for ALS research in 2014 alone, and helped fund the discovery of a gene linked to the disease.
Q 15Which company developed Pokémon Go, launched in July 2016?
Niantic
Niantic, spun out of Google in 2015, developed the game for The Pokémon Company; it passed $600 million in revenue within about 90 days of launch, faster than any mobile game before it.
Q 16Which 13-employee photo-sharing app did Facebook agree to buy for about $1 billion in April 2012?
Instagram, launched by Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger in October 2010, had about 30 million users and no revenue when Facebook struck the deal; it passed a billion monthly users in 2018.
Q 17What was the starting price of the original iPad when it went on sale in April 2010?
$499
The 16 GB Wi-Fi model cost $499; Steve Jobs had unveiled the iPad on January 27, 2010, and Apple sold about 300,000 on the April 3 launch day.
Q 18In December 2012, which song's video became the first on YouTube to reach one billion views?
Gangnam Style
Gangnam Style, Psy's horse-dance hit released in July 2012, passed a billion views on 21 December 2012, barely five months later, and was YouTube's most-viewed video until 2017.
Q 19The 2012 Summer Olympics made which city the first to host the modern Games three times?
London
London had already staged the Games twice, most recently in 1948; the 2012 opening ceremony, directed by Danny Boyle, was held on 27 July, and the United States topped the medal table.
Q 20Which country won its first World Cup in 2010, beating the Netherlands 1-0 in the final in South Africa?
Spain
Spain won 1-0 through Andrés Iniesta's 116th-minute goal in Johannesburg on 11 July 2010; South Africa was the first African nation to host the tournament.
Q 24The 2016 Cavaliers were the first team to win the NBA Finals after trailing by what margin?
3-1
Cleveland came back from 3-1 down against a Warriors side that had gone 73-9 in the regular season, winning the seventh game in Oakland 93-89 to end the city's 52-year title drought.
Q 25Which sprinter won the 100 m and 200 m at three straight Olympics, finishing in Rio 2016?
Usain Bolt
Usain Bolt took the 100 m and 200 m at the 2008, 2012 and 2016 Games; his 9.58-second 100 m world record from Berlin in 2009 remained unbroken through the decade.
Q 26Prince died on April 21, 2016, at which Minnesota home and recording complex?
Paisley Park
Paisley Park, in Chanhassen, Minnesota, was Prince's home and studio complex; he was 57, and the cause was an accidental overdose of counterfeit pills laced with fentanyl.
Q 27The dress that divided the internet in February 2015 was actually which colours?
Blue and black
Blue and black was the real colouring of the Roman Originals dress; the retailer sold out within 30 minutes of the viral post and later auctioned a one-off white-and-gold version for charity.
Q 28Harambe, the gorilla shot in May 2016 after a boy fell into his enclosure, lived at which zoo?
Cincinnati Zoo
Cincinnati Zoo staff shot the 17-year-old western lowland gorilla on 28 May 2016 after a three-year-old climbed into the Gorilla World enclosure; Harambe became one of the year's biggest memes.
Q 29In May 2010, Laszlo Hanyecz made the first known commercial bitcoin purchase, paying 10,000 BTC for what?
Two pizzas
Two pizzas from Papa John's, ordered for him by a forum user for about $25, were what Hanyecz got; the 10,000 BTC were worth around $41 at the time, and enthusiasts mark May 22 as Bitcoin Pizza Day.
Q 30Greta Thunberg sailed across the Atlantic to a UN climate summit in August 2019 aboard which racing yacht?
Malizia II
Malizia II, a 60-foot IMOCA racing yacht skippered by Boris Herrmann, carried her from Plymouth to New York in about two weeks; she had begun her school strike a year earlier, at 15.