2020 Year in Review Trivia
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47 free 2020 Year in Review trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
2020 was the year the world stayed home. A virus first quarantined in Wuhan shut down Olympics, Eurovision and Broadway, the NBA finished its season inside a Disney World bubble, and a 90-year-old in Coventry got the first approved vaccine shot in December. These 2020 trivia questions cover the whole year in review: Parasite's Best Picture win, Tiger King and Animal Crossing, Kobe Bryant and Chadwick Boseman, Folklore, the US election, SpaceX's first crewed flight and the closest Jupiter-Saturn conjunction in four centuries. Every answer is sourced and explained.
30 of 47 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which film became the first non-English-language movie to win Best Picture at the 2020 Oscars?
Parasite
Parasite. South Korea had been submitting films to the Oscars since 1962 without earning a single nomination, then Bong Joon-ho's thriller won four awards in one night.
Q 02Which city was placed under quarantine on 23 January 2020, with all transport halted?
Wuhan
Wuhan. The mayor said about five million people had already left the city of 11 million for the Lunar New Year holiday before it was sealed.
Q 03Which actor revealed a positive COVID test from Australia the day the WHO declared a pandemic?
Tom Hanks
Tom Hanks. He and Rita Wilson fell ill while he prepared to play Elvis Presley's manager, and the NBA suspended its season the same night.
Q 04Which country was the first to impose a nationwide quarantine in response to COVID-19?
Italy
Italy. Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte stretched a lockdown of the north to all 60 million people, telling them to stay at home under measures he summed up as 'I stay home'.
Q 05Which team won Super Bowl LIV in February 2020, beating the San Francisco 49ers 31–20?
Kansas City Chiefs
Kansas City Chiefs. They trailed 20–10 going into the fourth quarter, then Patrick Mahomes led 21 unanswered points to end the franchise's 50-year title drought.
Q 06Who co-headlined the Super Bowl LIV halftime show with Shakira?
Jennifer Lopez
Jennifer Lopez. Her 11-year-old daughter Emme joined her on stage, backed by a children's chorus, to lead the way into 'Let's Get Loud'.
Q 07Who hosted the Grammys at Staples Center hours after Kobe Bryant's death?
Alicia Keys
Alicia Keys. She told the room it was 'heartbroken in the house that Kobe Bryant built', then sang a farewell with Boyz II Men.
Q 08Where did the NBA finish its 2019–20 season inside a bio-secure bubble?
Walt Disney World
Walt Disney World. Each player was handed a MagicBand, the wristband theme-park guests use as a room key, and the league also used it to check players in for virus tests.
Q 09Which team won the 2020 NBA Finals, beating the Miami Heat 4–2?
Los Angeles Lakers
Los Angeles Lakers. They had missed the playoffs in each of the previous six seasons, the longest drought in franchise history, before LeBron James led them to a 17th title.
Q 10Which Texas ballpark hosted the entire 2020 World Series as a neutral site?
Globe Life Field
Globe Life Field. The Texas Rangers' new park had crowds barred all season, so its first baseball fans came for playoff games the Rangers weren't in; no World Series had stayed in one park since 1944.
Q 11Which team won the 2020 World Series in six games, its first title since 1988?
Dodgers
Dodgers. Third baseman Justin Turner was pulled in the eighth inning of the clincher after a positive COVID test, news that broke while his teammates were still celebrating on the field.
Q 12Which Nintendo Switch game released on March 20, 2020 became a lockdown phenomenon?
Animal Crossing: New Horizons
Animal Crossing: New Horizons. With real gatherings off limits, players held weddings, birthday parties and graduation ceremonies on its islands instead.
Q 13Which video-call app went from 10 million daily meeting participants in late 2019 to 300 million by April 2020?
Zoom
Q 21The so-called murder hornet made 2020 headlines after nests were found in which US state?
Washington
Washington. The nests were found near the Canadian border, 'murder hornet' was a media nickname for the Asian giant hornet, and officials declared it eradicated from the United States at the end of 2024.
Q 22The Tokyo Olympics, postponed in March 2020, were held a year later under which official name?
Tokyo 2020
Tokyo 2020. The modern Olympics had only ever been cancelled in wartime, never delayed, and organisers kept the original name even though the Games took place in 2021.
Q 23Which 2020 hit spent 90 weeks on the Hot 100 and was later named its best-performing song ever?
Blinding Lights
Zoom. It first announced the 300 million as users, then had to correct itself: the figure counts every time someone joins a meeting, so one person can be counted several times a day.
Q 14Which game, released in 2018 to little notice, did Twitch streamers turn into a 2020 phenomenon?
Among Us
Among Us. Streamers found it two years after launch, and the surge was so sudden that its small studio cancelled a planned sequel to keep the original running.
Q 15Which album did Taylor Swift surprise-release on July 24, 2020?
Folklore
Folklore. She announced it less than a day ahead, saying she had written and recorded it in isolation; Aaron Dessner of The National co-wrote or produced 11 of its 16 songs.
Q 16Which docuseries did ESPN bring forward to April 2020 for sport-starved fans?
The Last Dance
The Last Dance. ESPN said fans had been calling for it early, so it sped up production of the ten-part story of the Bulls' 1997–98 title run, Jordan's last season in Chicago.
Q 17Chadwick Boseman died in August 2020 after a private four-year battle with which illness?
Colon cancer
Colon cancer. Diagnosed in 2016, he never spoke of it publicly and kept making films, from Marshall to Da 5 Bloods, during and between surgeries and chemotherapy.
Q 18Which fictional chess prodigy did Anya Taylor-Joy play in The Queen's Gambit?
Beth Harmon
Beth Harmon. Her story reached 62 million households in four weeks, and chess set sales shot up so fast that shops struggled to keep them in stock.
Q 19Which show swept all seven major comedy categories at the 2020 Primetime Emmys?
Schitt's Creek
Schitt's Creek. In the US it spent years on a hard-to-find cable channel until Netflix brought it an audience, and 15 of its 19 Emmy nominations came for its final season.
Q 20Which game-show host kept taping through 20 months of pancreatic cancer treatment before his death in November 2020?
Alex Trebek
Alex Trebek. The Jeopardy! host of more than 36 years was last in the studio on October 29, ten days before he died at 80, and his final episodes aired the following January.
Blinding Lights. The Weeknd's single was the first to spend a whole year in the Hot 100's top ten, yet it received zero Grammy nominations, and he called the awards corrupt.
Q 24Which Broadway musical's filmed stage show reached Disney+ in July 2020, 15 months before its planned cinema release?
Hamilton
Hamilton. Disney had paid $75 million for a live capture of the original cast and booked it into cinemas for October 2021, then sent it straight to streaming instead.
Q 25Which rock guitarist died on October 6, 2020, at age 65?
Eddie Van Halen
Eddie Van Halen. Beyond his own band he played the guitar solo on Michael Jackson's 'Beat It'; his former wife Valerie Bertinelli said she and their son Wolfgang held him in his last moments.
Q 26Which Christopher Nolan film was the big-budget test of reopened cinemas in 2020?
Tenet
Tenet. Its July release date slipped again and again that summer, and it proved to be Nolan's last film for Warner Bros.: he took his next one to Universal.
Q 27Tiger King followed Joe Exotic's feud with which big-cat rescue owner?
Carole Baskin
Carole Baskin. In June 2020 a judge handed her Joe Exotic's former zoo, ruling he had shifted the land to his mother to dodge the roughly $1 million he owed her over a trademark case.
Q 28Margaret Keenan, 90, became the first person outside trials to receive which COVID-19 vaccine?
Pfizer–BioNTech
Pfizer–BioNTech. She called the jab the best early birthday present, a week before turning 91, and the next patient in line was an 81-year-old named William Shakespeare.
Q 29Which country was first in the world to approve a fully tested COVID-19 vaccine, on 2 Dec 2020?
United Kingdom
United Kingdom. Its regulator cleared the jab nine days ahead of the US FDA, and mass vaccination began there six days after the approval.
Q 30Which company's capsule carried astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley to orbit in May 2020?
SpaceX
SpaceX. Its Crew Dragon capsule, named Endeavour, ended a nine-year gap in which no astronauts had launched to orbit from American soil, and was the first crewed orbital flight run by a private company.