2013 Trivia
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50 free 2013 trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
2013 was the year a pope quit for the first time in six centuries, a meteor blew out windows across a Russian city, a Baltimore–San Francisco Super Bowl paused for a blackout, and a 16-year-old from New Zealand knocked every other song off the top of the charts. This quiz walks through the whole year: the news (Snowden, the Boston Marathon, Rana Plaza, Typhoon Haiyan, Euromaidan, Mandela's death), the sports (the Red Sox, the Heat, Andy Murray at Wimbledon, the Har-Bowl) and the pop culture (Breaking Bad's finale, Frozen, House of Cards, the Harlem Shake, the PS4 launch, Sharknado). Every answer comes with a short explanation, so it doubles as a recap of the year that gave us the word 'bingeable'.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01A meteor exploded over which Russian city on February 15, 2013, injuring more than a thousand people?
Chelyabinsk
Chelyabinsk: the blast's shock wave blew in windows across the city, so most of the injured were cut by flying glass, not struck by falling rock.
Q 02Which pope resigned on February 28, 2013?
Benedict XVI
Benedict XVI, the first pope to resign in nearly 600 years, announced it in Latin to a meeting of cardinals, and an Italian reporter who followed the Latin broke the news.
Q 03Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio of Argentina took which papal name in March 2013?
Francis
Francis: as the vote went his way, a Brazilian cardinal hugged him and whispered 'Don't forget the poor', and Francis of Assisi came straight to his mind.
Q 04In February 2013, which country swore in its first female president, the daughter of a former military ruler?
South Korea
South Korea: Park Geun-hye was the daughter of Park Chung-hee, the general who took power in a 1961 coup, and her own term ended early when a court upheld her impeachment in 2017.
Q 05Which former British prime minister died on April 8, 2013?
Margaret Thatcher
Margaret Thatcher: opponents marked her death by buying 'Ding-Dong! The Witch Is Dead', sending the 1939 Wizard of Oz song to number two in that week's UK singles chart.
Q 06In which country did the Rana Plaza garment-factory collapse kill more than 1,100 people in April 2013?
Bangladesh
Bangladesh: within three weeks of the Rana Plaza collapse, global clothing brands and trade unions signed a legally binding accord to inspect and repair the country's garment factories.
Q 07Willem-Alexander took the throne of which country on April 30, 2013?
Netherlands
Netherlands: he was the first Dutch king since 1890, so the national Queen's Day holiday became King's Day and moved from April 30 to April 27, his birthday.
Q 08Emmelie de Forest won the 2013 Eurovision Song Contest for which country?
Denmark
Denmark: her win with 'Only Teardrops' took the 2014 contest to Copenhagen, where the hosts staged it in a converted shipyard hall.
Q 09A tornado swelled to a record 2.6 miles wide in which US state on May 31, 2013?
Oklahoma
Oklahoma: the El Reno tornado grew and swerved so fast that it overran veteran researcher Tim Samaras, his son Paul and colleague Carl Young as they chased it.
Q 10Which country granted Edward Snowden temporary asylum after his June 2013 NSA disclosures?
Russia
Russia: he landed in Moscow meaning only to change planes for Latin America, then spent 39 days in the airport's transit zone before the asylum papers came through.
Q 11Which country became the 28th member of the European Union on July 1, 2013?
Croatia
Croatia: its entry was nearly derailed by a neighbour, as Slovenia blocked the membership talks for months in a quarrel over the sea border in the tiny Bay of Piran.
Q 12Which Egyptian president, elected a year earlier after Hosni Mubarak's fall, was removed in a military coup on July 3, 2013?
Mohamed Morsi
Mohamed Morsi: the army moved after mass protests on his first anniversary in office, and the general who announced his removal, Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, became president the next year.
Q 13What was the runaway train carrying when it derailed and exploded in Lac-Mégantic, Quebec, in July 2013?
Crude oil
Q 21The Euromaidan protests began in November 2013 in which country?
Ukraine
Ukraine: crowds filled Kyiv's Independence Square after President Viktor Yanukovych backed out of signing a pact with the EU, and three months later he fled the capital.
Q 22Which country made the first soft Moon landing since 1976 with its Jade Rabbit rover in December 2013?
China
China: the Chang'e 3 mission's rover lost the ability to drive after about six weeks, yet kept sending data for more than two years.
Q 23Which Canadian short-story writer won the 2013 Nobel Prize in Literature?
Alice Munro
Alice Munro had announced her retirement earlier that year, and the Swedish Academy, unable to reach her before the announcement, left the news on her answering machine.
Crude oil: the parked, unattended train lost its air brakes after its last running engine was shut down, then rolled seven miles downhill into the town centre, where the fire killed 47 people.
Q 14Philippe was sworn in as monarch of which country on July 21, 2013?
Belgium
His father Albert II abdicated on Belgium's national day. Spain's Juan Carlos would follow suit a year later.
Q 15Weeks after Labor dumped Julia Gillard, Tony Abbott's Coalition beat which returning prime minister in Australia's September 2013 election?
Kevin Rudd
Kevin Rudd had been back in the job for under three months, having toppled Julia Gillard, the former deputy who had ousted him in 2010.
Q 16In 2013 the IOC chose which city to host its second Summer Olympics, 56 years after its first?
Tokyo
Tokyo beat Istanbul 60–36 in the final vote, but the pandemic pushed its 2020 Games back a year and they went ahead almost entirely without spectators.
Q 17Which video game earned more than half a billion dollars on its first day, September 17, 2013?
Grand Theft Auto V
Grand Theft Auto V: with an estimated $265 million budget it was reported to be the most expensive game yet made, and it took in about three times that in its first 24 hours.
Q 18Which version of Windows did Microsoft release on October 17, 2013?
Windows 8.1
Windows 8.1 put back the Start button that Windows 8 had stripped from the taskbar a year earlier, though clicking it opened the tiled Start screen, not the old menu.
Q 19Which country launched its Mars Orbiter Mission in November 2013 and reached the planet on its first attempt?
India
India: the probe, nicknamed Mangalyaan, got to Mars on a budget of about $74 million, which the prime minister boasted was less than Hollywood spent making the film Gravity.
Q 20Typhoon Haiyan, known locally as Yolanda, devastated which country in November 2013?
Philippines
Philippines: the worst of the killing was done by the sea rather than the wind, as a storm surge several metres high swept through the city of Tacloban like a tsunami.
Q 24François Englert and Peter Higgs shared the 2013 Nobel Prize in which field?
Physics
Physics: the prize came a year after CERN found the boson the pair predicted in 1964, and Higgs, who owned no mobile phone, learned he had won from a former neighbour in the street.
Q 252013's Nobel Peace laureate had just begun dismantling which country's chemical weapons?
Syria
Syria: the OPCW, the world's chemical weapons watchdog, had overseen the first destruction of its arsenal only five days before the prize was announced, under a deal struck to head off American air strikes.
Q 26The United Nations designated 2013 the International Year of which food?
Quinoa
Quinoa: the UN said the year honoured the Andean peoples whose ancestral farming had preserved the grain, and Bolivia, a leading producer, chaired the committee that ran it.
Q 27Edith Windsor's Supreme Court victory in June 2013 struck down a key section of which federal law?
Defense of Marriage Act
Defense of Marriage Act: Windsor sued after being billed $363,053 in estate tax on her late wife's estate, a bill no widow of a husband would have received.
Q 28In February 2013, a hoax alert on hijacked Emergency Alert Systems at several US TV stations warned of what?
A zombie apocalypse
A zombie apocalypse: viewers in Montana and Michigan were told that the bodies of the dead were rising from their graves and attacking the living, and were warned not to approach them.
Q 29Whose December 2013 memorial featured a fake sign-language interpreter?
Nelson Mandela
Nelson Mandela had died on December 5, aged 95; at the stadium memorial the interpreter signed gibberish for hours, and later blamed a schizophrenic episode.
Q 30Which royal baby was born third in line to the throne on July 22, 2013?
Prince George
Prince George met the cameras on the same hospital steps where his father William had been shown off 31 years earlier, while crowds queued at Buckingham Palace to photograph the birth notice on its easel.