2015 Trivia
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100 free 2015 trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
2015 was the year a probe finally reached Pluto, a horse ended a 37-year Triple Crown drought, Adele sold 3.38 million albums in a week and Star Wars came back to break every box-office record on the books. This quiz walks through the whole year: the news (Charlie Hebdo, the Iran deal, the Obergefell ruling, the Paris climate agreement), the sports (Super Bowl XLIX, the Warriors' first title in 40 years, the Royals, the US women's World Cup win), and the pop culture (Letterman's farewell, Caitlyn Jenner's Vanity Fair cover, Windows 10, the Nobel winners). Every answer has a short explanation, so it doubles as a recap of a year that already feels like a different era.
30 of 100 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which country adopted the euro on January 1, 2015, becoming the 19th eurozone member?
Lithuania
Lithuania had first asked to join in 2006 and was turned down because its inflation ran at 2.7% against a limit of 2.6%; nine years on it gave up the litas, the last of the three Baltic states to switch.
Q 02Gunmen killed 12 people at the offices of which French satirical newspaper in January 2015?
Charlie Hebdo
Charlie Hebdo's surviving staff published the next issue a week later; instead of the usual 60,000 copies the print run climbed into the millions, and the first copies sold out within hours.
Q 03Which party, led by Alexis Tsipras, won Greece's January 2015 election?
SYRIZA
SYRIZA won 149 of 300 seats, two short of a majority, so the left-wing party took office with the right-leaning Independent Greeks, a partner it shared little with beyond opposing the bailout cuts.
Q 04Which country won the 2015 Cricket World Cup, a tournament it co-hosted?
Australia
Australia won its fifth title, and captain Michael Clarke, playing his last one-day international, dedicated it to teammate Phillip Hughes, who had died four months earlier after a bouncer struck his neck.
Q 05NASA's Dawn probe entered orbit around which dwarf planet in March 2015?
Ceres
Ceres made Dawn the first spacecraft to orbit two worlds beyond Earth, after the asteroid Vesta; the puzzling bright spots it found in Occator crater proved to be salt that had welled up from inside.
Q 06Whose Top Gear contract did the BBC decline to renew in March 2015?
Jeremy Clarkson
Jeremy Clarkson had punched producer Oisin Tymon in a row over the lack of hot food after a day's filming; co-hosts Richard Hammond and James May then left with him for Amazon's The Grand Tour.
Q 07In March 2015 a Germanwings A320 was deliberately crashed in which mountain range?
The French Alps
The French Alps crash killed all 150 aboard after the co-pilot locked the captain out of the cockpit; airlines then required two people on the flight deck at all times, a rule German carriers dropped in 2017.
Q 08A magnitude 7.8 earthquake in April 2015 killed nearly 9,000 people in which country?
Nepal
Nepal's quake also set off an avalanche that swept through Everest Base Camp just as the climbing season was beginning, and a second major tremor, of magnitude 7.3, struck the country on May 12.
Q 09Which disease did the WHO declare eliminated from the Americas in April 2015?
Rubella
Rubella was the third disease driven out of the Americas, after smallpox in 1971 and polio in 1994; a 15-year vaccination drive ended local spread of a virus that causes birth defects when caught in pregnancy.
Q 10Which artist's Les Femmes d'Alger sold for a record $179 million at Christie's in May 2015?
Pablo Picasso
Pablo Picasso began the series in 1954, soon after the death of his friend and rival Henri Matisse, taking up the harem scenes Matisse was known for as a tribute.
Q 11Which country won the 2015 Eurovision Song Contest in Vienna with the song 'Heroes'?
Sweden
Sweden's Måns Zelmerlöw sang 'Heroes' alongside animated figures projected around him and beat Russia by 62 points; the win took the 2016 contest to Stockholm, where he came back as co-host.
Q 12Which FIFA president announced his intention to resign in June 2015 amid a corruption probe?
Sepp Blatter
Sepp Blatter quit just four days after winning a fifth term, in a vote held two days after Swiss police, acting for US prosecutors, led FIFA officials out of a five-star Zurich hotel at dawn.
Q 13The inaugural European Games were held in June 2015 in which city?
Baku
Baku was the only candidate: Azerbaijan's capital offered to stage the brand-new event, and Europe's Olympic committees approved it in a single secret ballot in 2012, by 38 votes out of 48.
Q 21Homo naledi, a new species of early human announced in September 2015, was found where?
South Africa
South Africa's Rising Star cave gave up 15 partial skeletons from a chamber reached by a narrow crawl; the team argued, controversially, that this small-brained species had carried its dead there on purpose.
Q 22Gravitational waves were first detected in September 2015 by which observatory?
LIGO
LIGO caught waves from two black holes that collided 1.3 billion years ago, confirming a prediction Albert Einstein made a century earlier; three of its architects won the 2017 Nobel Prize in Physics.
Q 23Who replaced Tony Abbott as Australian Prime Minister in September 2015?
Malcolm Turnbull
Q 14Laudato si', Pope Francis's 2015 encyclical, was devoted to which issue?
The environment
The environment is 'our common home' in the letter, which urged swift global action on warming; its title, 'Praise be to you', comes from a hymn to creation by St Francis of Assisi, the pope's namesake.
Q 15On July 14, 2015, NASA's New Horizons became the first spacecraft to fly past what?
Pluto
Pluto was reached after a journey of more than nine years, and the photographs sent back revealed a bright heart-shaped region whose western lobe is a vast glacier of nitrogen ice.
Q 16Which desktop operating system did Microsoft release on July 29, 2015?
Windows 10
Windows 10 skipped the number 9, and for its first year Microsoft gave the upgrade away free to Windows 7 and 8 users, dropping its old policy of charging for each major new version.
Q 17In July 2015 the IOC awarded the 2022 Winter Olympics to which city?
Beijing
Beijing beat Almaty by just 44 votes to 40 after Oslo, Stockholm and other European bidders pulled out over money and politics; it became the first city to be given both the Summer and the Winter Games.
Q 18Wing debris that washed up on Réunion in July 2015 was confirmed to come from which lost airliner?
Malaysia Airlines Flight 370
Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 had vanished in March 2014 with 239 people aboard; the wing flap found 16 months later was the first piece of the jet ever identified, proof that it came down in the Indian Ocean.
Q 19Chemical warehouse explosions that killed more than 160 people in August 2015 struck the port of which Chinese city?
Tianjin
Tianjin's blasts began when dry nitrocellulose overheated and caught fire; the crews sent to fight it were never told that 800 tons of ammonium nitrate sat nearby, and firefighters made up most of the dead.
Q 20On September 9, 2015, Queen Elizabeth II passed whom as Britain's longest-reigning monarch?
Victoria
Victoria was her great-great-grandmother; the Queen spent the day opening a railway in the Scottish Borders, where she said the record was 'not one to which I have ever aspired'.
Malcolm Turnbull beat Abbott by 54 votes to 44 in a late-night party ballot, six years after losing the Liberal leadership to the same man by a single vote.
Q 24Which carmaker was accused in September 2015 of rigging diesel emissions tests worldwide?
Volkswagen
Volkswagen had fitted 'defeat device' software that could tell when a car was being tested and cleaned up its exhaust only then; on the road the engines gave off up to 40 times the permitted nitrogen oxides.
Q 25Which team won the 2015 Rugby World Cup in England?
New Zealand
New Zealand became the first team to retain the title, winning the final 34–17 at Twickenham; fly-half Dan Carter, injured out of the 2011 tournament, kicked 19 points and was man of the match.
Q 26Which October 2015 hurricane became the strongest ever recorded in the Western Hemisphere, with 215 mph winds?
Patricia
Patricia grew from a tropical storm to a Category 5 hurricane in about a day, yet it came ashore on a sparsely populated stretch of Mexico's Pacific coast and weakened quickly, so the death toll stayed low.
Q 27A deadly 2015 fire at the Colectiv nightclub brought down the government of which country?
Romania
Romania's fire started when a band's fireworks set light to soundproofing foam in a Bucharest club; some 20,000 people marched against corruption and lax safety checks, and Prime Minister Victor Ponta resigned within days.
Q 28Gunmen stormed which concert hall during an Eagles of Death Metal show on November 13, 2015?
Bataclan
The Bataclan was the deadliest site of that night's coordinated attacks, with 90 of the 130 people killed; it stayed shut for a year and reopened with a concert by Sting.
Q 29In November 2015 which NATO member shot down a Russian warplane it said had strayed into its airspace?
Turkey
Turkey said the Su-24 had crossed into its airspace for 17 seconds after ignoring ten warnings in five minutes; Russia insisted its bomber never left Syria, and Vladimir Putin called the attack a 'stab in the back'.
Q 30Which non-profit AI research company was launched in December 2015?
OpenAI
OpenAI launched as a non-profit with $1 billion pledged by backers including Elon Musk, promising AI for the benefit of humanity; within four years it had added a profit-making arm to attract investors.