2019 Trivia
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8correct to beat the crowd
100 free 2019 trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
2019 was the last year before everything changed, and it was packed: a Paris cathedral burned during Holy Week, Marvel's finale overtook Avatar, Game of Thrones ended with a king nobody predicted, and a cricket World Cup final was settled by counting boundaries. Astronomers showed us a black hole for the first time, a Kenyan ran a marathon in under two hours, and a teenager who sailed to New York became Time's Person of the Year. These 100 questions cover the year's news, films, television, music and sport, from Brexit's revolving door at Number 10 to Lil Nas X's 19 weeks at number one, the Palme d'Or that went on to win Best Picture, a Champions League final in Madrid, a headline set at Glastonbury and the Eurovision win that ended a 44-year Dutch drought. Most are pitched for a pub table; a handful reward the people who really paid attention. Play it on your phone with instant answers and explanations, or print it for a pub quiz, office quiz or New Year's Eve round.
30 of 100 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which Paris church lost its roof and spire to a fire on 15 April, while its three rose windows survived?
Notre-Dame
Notre-Dame's two bell towers and stone shell were saved, along with the altar and organs, and the rebuilt cathedral reopened in December 2024.
Q 02Which Marvel film overtook Avatar in July as the highest-grossing film ever, holding the crown until 2021?
Avengers: Endgame
Avengers: Endgame was only the fifth film ever to gross $2 billion, and it lost the all-time record in March 2021 when Avatar was re-released in China.
Q 03Which Game of Thrones character, by then the Three-Eyed Raven, was chosen as king in the finale 'The Iron Throne'?
Bran Stark
Bran Stark is proclaimed 'Bran the Broken', King of the Six Kingdoms, after Sansa wins the North its independence; actor Isaac Hempstead Wright said the ending came from George R. R. Martin himself.
Q 04Which country-trap single, remixed with Billy Ray Cyrus, topped the Billboard Hot 100 for a then-record 19 weeks?
Old Town Road
Old Town Road by Lil Nas X held No. 1 for 19 consecutive weeks after Billboard quietly removed it from its Hot Country chart for not 'embracing enough elements of today's country music'.
Q 05Which golfer won the 2019 Masters at 43, his fifth green jacket and first major since the 2008 U.S. Open?
Tiger Woods
Tiger Woods won by a single stroke, seven months after his first tournament victory in five years had ended a long slump; only Jack Nicklaus, at 46, has won the Masters older.
Q 06Who crossed the Atlantic on the racing yacht Malizia II, then became Time's youngest Person of the Year?
Greta Thunberg
Greta Thunberg, the 16-year-old climate activist, sailed from Plymouth to New York in 15 days rather than fly; the yacht drew its power from solar panels and underwater turbines.
Q 07Who became UK prime minister on 24 July after beating Jeremy Hunt in the contest to replace Theresa May?
Boris Johnson
Boris Johnson then called a snap election and on 12 December won the Conservatives an 80-seat Commons majority.
Q 08Which club beat Tottenham Hotspur 2–0 in Madrid to win the 2019 Champions League final, its sixth European Cup?
Liverpool
Liverpool's Mohamed Salah converted a penalty inside two minutes and substitute Divock Origi sealed it in the 87th minute, handing Jürgen Klopp his first trophy at the club.
Q 09Which US winger took both the Golden Ball and Golden Boot at the Women's World Cup, then the Ballon d'Or Féminin?
Megan Rapinoe
Megan Rapinoe scored in the final too, at 34 the oldest woman to do so in a World Cup final, and was named player of the match before taking the year's top individual awards.
Q 10Which streaming service signed up more than 10 million subscribers within a day of its launch on 12 November?
Disney+
Disney+ opened with The Mandalorian, whose 'Baby Yoda', officially 'the Child', was built with animatronics and puppetry rather than pure computer graphics.
Q 11How was the 2019 Cricket World Cup final at Lord's settled after both the match and the Super Over ended tied?
Boundary count
England's boundary count of 26 to New Zealand's 17 decided it, the only time a World Cup has been settled that way, and the ICC scrapped the rule soon after.
Q 12Which team beat England 32–12 in Yokohama to win the 2019 Rugby World Cup, led by captain Siya Kolisi?
South Africa
South Africa became the first team to win the title after losing a pool match, and Siya Kolisi, the Springboks' first black captain, was the one who lifted the trophy.
Q 13Which team beat the Golden State Warriors in six games to win the 2019 NBA Finals, its first championship?
Toronto Raptors
Q 21Which proposed law brought hundreds of thousands of Hong Kong marchers out on 9 June and was formally withdrawn that October?
Extradition bill
The extradition bill was suspended in June and Carrie Lam promised its withdrawal on 4 September, but by then the protests had widened into demands for democracy and an inquiry into the police.
Q 22Which country held a funeral in August for Okjökull, a glacier declared dead after shrinking to a patch of ice?
Iceland
Iceland's mourners fixed a plaque titled 'A letter to the future' to the bare rock, warning that all the country's main glaciers are expected to go the same way within 200 years.
Q 23Which travel firm, a brand in use since 1841, collapsed in September, stranding around 600,000 holidaymakers?
Toronto Raptors bosses had gambled a year earlier, trading fan favourite DeMar DeRozan for Kawhi Leonard; he was named Finals MVP and left for Los Angeles within weeks.
Q 14Which film became the first R-rated movie to gross $1 billion, after winning the Golden Lion at Venice?
Joker
Joker took the top prize at Venice a month before its release, and stayed the highest-grossing R-rated film until Deadpool & Wolverine passed it in 2024.
Q 15Which South Korean film about a poor family infiltrating a rich household won the 2019 Palme d'Or at Cannes?
Parasite
Parasite was the first Korean film to take the Palme d'Or and went on to become the first non-English-language film to win the Best Picture Oscar.
Q 16Which 17-year-old became the first artist born in the 21st century to top the US Hot 100, with 'Bad Guy'?
Billie Eilish
Billie Eilish had already become the first 21st-century-born act to top the Billboard 200 in April with When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go?, written with her brother Finneas O'Connell.
Q 17Which country won the 2019 Eurovision Song Contest in Tel Aviv with Duncan Laurence's song 'Arcade'?
Netherlands
The Netherlands won without topping either the jury vote or the public vote, ending a 44-year wait since Teach-In's 'Ding-a-dong' in 1975.
Q 18The outbreak that grew into the COVID-19 pandemic was first reported in December in which Chinese city?
Wuhan
Wuhan's cluster of unknown pneumonia cases was reported to the WHO's China office on 31 December, and the '19' in COVID-19 marks that year of first identification.
Q 19Who was carried out of Ecuador's London embassy by police in April after almost seven years inside?
Julian Assange
Julian Assange, the WikiLeaks founder, was jailed for 50 weeks for skipping bail; within weeks Sweden reopened its rape inquiry and the United States began seeking his removal to face charges.
Q 20Which comedian who played a fictional president in Servant of the People won Ukraine's real presidency in April?
Volodymyr Zelenskyy
Volodymyr Zelenskyy took 73 percent of the run-off vote against the sitting president, Petro Poroshenko, and his new party even borrowed the show's name.
Thomas Cook
Thomas Cook's failure set off Operation Matterhorn, the UK's biggest peacetime repatriation, with aircraft borrowed from airlines around the world to fly its British customers home.
Q 24Which airliner was grounded worldwide in March after Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302, its second crash in five months?
Boeing 737 MAX
The Boeing 737 MAX's MCAS flight-control software had activated in both accidents, and the jets stayed grounded for 20 months until US regulators cleared them in November 2020.
Q 25Which Ethiopian prime minister won the 2019 Nobel Peace Prize for ending the border conflict with Eritrea?
Abiy Ahmed
Abiy Ahmed offered Eritrea peace within months of taking office in 2018; a year after the prize, his own government was at war in Ethiopia's Tigray region.
Q 26Which spacecraft made the first soft landing on the far side of the Moon, in the Von Kármán crater on 3 January?
Chang'e 4
Chang'e 4 carried a sealed mini-biosphere in which a cotton seed sprouted, the first plant to grow on the Moon; it died within days, once the power was shut down for the lunar night.
Q 27Which SI unit was defined by a platinum-iridium cylinder for 130 years until new definitions took effect on 20 May?
The kilogram
The kilogram is now fixed by the Planck constant; the old prototype and its official copies had drifted apart by about 50 micrograms over a century.
Q 28The first image of a black hole, released in April by the Event Horizon Telescope, showed which galaxy's core?
Messier 87
Messier 87's supermassive black hole, designated M87*, was captured by radio dishes spanning the globe; the Milky Way's own Sagittarius A* was not imaged until May 2022.
Q 29Which era name began in Japan on 1 May when Naruhito took the throne after his father Akihito's abdication?
Reiwa
Reiwa, glossed by Japan's Foreign Ministry as 'beautiful harmony', was the first era name drawn from Japanese literature, the Man'yōshū, rather than the Chinese classics.
Q 30What did explorer Victor Vescovo report finding on the floor of the Challenger Deep, the deepest point in the ocean?
Plastic waste
Plastic waste, which Vescovo described as a bag and sweet wrappers, had beaten him to the deepest place on Earth; he went down in the submersible Limiting Factor and was the first person to dive there twice.