2022 Trivia
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46 free 2022 trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
2022 was the year Will Smith slapped Chris Rock, the New York Times bought Wordle, Queen Elizabeth II died, Elon Musk bought Twitter, Argentina won the World Cup on penalties and a lettuce outlasted a British prime minister. These current events trivia questions for 2022 cover the news, films, shows, songs, games and sports of the year. Every answer is sourced, with a short explanation so you learn something even when you miss.
30 of 46 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which film won Best Picture in March 2022, the first winner released by a streamer?
CODA
CODA follows the hearing daughter of a deaf family, and when Troy Kotsur won for it that night the audience applauded in sign language, waving their hands in the air.
Q 02Will Smith slapped which comedian on stage at the 2022 Oscars?
Chris Rock
Chris Rock had joked about Jada Pinkett Smith's shaved head; within the hour Smith won Best Actor for King Richard, and the Academy later banned him from its events for ten years.
Q 03Which actor returned as Iceman in 2022's Top Gun: Maverick?
Val Kilmer
Val Kilmer had lost his voice to throat cancer, so the few words Iceman speaks to Maverick were made from his own voice, digitally altered to be clear.
Q 04Queen Elizabeth II died on September 8, 2022 at which residence?
Balmoral Castle
Balmoral Castle is in Scotland, so her death set off Operation Unicorn, the plan for a death north of the border: her coffin rested in Edinburgh before the journey to London.
Q 05Argentina's 2022 World Cup win was its first since which star's 1986 team?
Diego Maradona
Diego Maradona's 1986 side was Argentina's last to win it until Lionel Messi's, which needed a penalty shoot-out after France twice came back in a 3-3 draw.
Q 06In 2022, Kylian Mbappé scored the first hat-trick in a men's World Cup final since which England striker in 1966?
Geoff Hurst
Geoff Hurst's three goals won the cup for England; Mbappé's could not save France, though they made him the tournament's top scorer with eight.
Q 07Which country became the first African nation to reach a World Cup semi-final in 2022?
Morocco
Morocco knocked out Spain on penalties and Portugal 1-0 before France stopped them 2-0, going further than any African or Arab team had before.
Q 08Why was the 2022 World Cup played in November and December?
To avoid Qatar's extreme heat
To avoid Qatar's extreme heat, where June highs average above 40°C, FIFA moved the tournament out of the summer for the first time, dropping it into the middle of Europe's club season.
Q 09Which newspaper bought the viral word game Wordle in January 2022?
The New York Times
The New York Times paid a price in the low seven figures to Josh Wardle, an engineer who had built the game for his partner and named it with a pun on his own surname.
Q 10Which team did the Los Angeles Rams beat in Super Bowl LVI in February 2022?
Cincinnati Bengals
The Cincinnati Bengals led 20-16 until Cooper Kupp's touchdown with 1:25 left; the 23-20 win came in the Rams' own SoFi Stadium, the second year running a team took the title at home.
Q 11The 2022 defamation trial between Johnny Depp and Amber Heard was held in which US state?
Virginia
Virginia got the case because the Washington Post, which ran Heard's 2018 op-ed, has its printing press and web servers in Fairfax County; the jury there found for Depp on June 1.
Q 12Which 1985 Kate Bush song topped charts around the world in 2022 after featuring in Stranger Things?
Running Up That Hill
Running Up That Hill stalled at number three in Britain in 1985; its return took it to number one there 37 years after release, at the time the longest wait any single had had.
Q 13In Stranger Things 4, what name do the kids give the villain, borrowed from Dungeons & Dragons?
Vecna
Q 21Artemis I, which lifted off on November 16, 2022, was the first flight of which NASA rocket?
Space Launch System
The Space Launch System flew only after hydrogen leaks and two hurricanes had held it up for months; its uncrewed Orion capsule then looped around the Moon and splashed down on December 11.
Q 22Shinzo Abe was assassinated in July 2022 while campaigning in which Japanese city?
Nara
Nara is where a man with a homemade gun shot him during a street speech; the suspect said he blamed the Unification Church, to which Abe had ties, for bankrupting his family.
Q 23Which UK prime minister's 2022 tenure was outlasted by a tabloid's livestreamed lettuce?
Liz Truss
Vecna turns out to be Henry Creel, once the lab's test subject One, whom Eleven herself had banished to the other world years before the kids gave him the name.
Q 14Which Beyonce single from Renaissance topped the Hot 100 in 2022?
Break My Soul
Break My Soul, a house track built on Robin S.'s "Show Me Love", gave Beyoncé her first solo number one since "Single Ladies" fourteen years earlier.
Q 15Which artist became the first to fill the entire top ten of the Billboard Hot 100 in a single week in 2022?
Taylor Swift
Taylor Swift did it with Midnights, passing the nine places Drake held in 2021; two weeks later the presale for her tour crashed Ticketmaster and led to a Senate hearing.
Q 16In Netflix's Wednesday, which school do the Addamses send their daughter to?
Nevermore Academy
Nevermore Academy is her mother's old school, where she is packed off after being expelled for loosing piranhas on the water polo team that bullied her brother.
Q 17House of the Dragon, which premiered in August 2022, adapts which 2018 book?
Fire & Blood
Fire & Blood is written as an in-world history by a maester weighing witnesses who contradict one another, so the show's writers had to decide which version of each event really happened.
Q 18Which fantasy author provided the worldbuilding for FromSoftware's Elden Ring?
George R.R. Martin
George R.R. Martin says video games are "not really my thing", but he wrote the world's backstory and history, then handed it to Hidetaka Miyazaki's team to build the game on.
Q 19The first full-color image from which space telescope was unveiled at the White House in July 2022?
Webb
The James Webb Space Telescope's view of galaxy cluster SMACS 0723 covered a patch of sky the size of a grain of sand held at arm's length, yet showed thousands of galaxies.
Q 20What was the aim of NASA's DART mission to the asteroid moonlet Dimorphos in 2022?
Deflection
Deflection: the spacecraft's crash cut Dimorphos's orbit around its parent asteroid by about 32 minutes, when NASA had set 73 seconds as the bar for success.
Liz Truss announced her resignation within a week of the Daily Star pointing a camera at the lettuce; her mini-budget of unfunded tax cuts had rattled the markets and her own party.
Q 24Which crypto exchange filed for bankruptcy on November 11, 2022?
FTX
FTX unravelled in nine days: a CoinDesk report on the balance sheet of sister firm Alameda Research set off a run on the exchange, and its founder was convicted of fraud a year later.
Q 25Which country topped the medal table at the Beijing 2022 Winter Olympics?
Norway
Norway's 16 golds were the most any nation had won at a single Winter Games, a record that lasted four years, until Norway beat it with a 17th gold in Italy.
Q 26Which Encanto song topped the US Hot 100 in early 2022?
We Don't Talk About Bruno
We Don't Talk About Bruno did what "Let It Go" never managed, giving a Disney animated film its first Hot 100 number one since "A Whole New World" from Aladdin in 1993.
Q 27Which team did the Houston Astros beat in the 2022 World Series?
Philadelphia Phillies
The Philadelphia Phillies led two games to one, then went hitless in Game 4, only the second no-hitter in World Series history, and Houston won the next two as well.
Q 28Who won his first NBA Finals MVP as the Warriors beat the Celtics in 2022?
Stephen Curry
Stephen Curry had won three titles without ever being named the Finals' best player; this time he scored 34 in the clinching game and took the award by a unanimous vote.
Q 29Which team ended the Tampa Bay Lightning's run of two straight Stanley Cups in 2022?
Colorado Avalanche
The Colorado Avalanche won in six games, stopping Tampa Bay two wins short of the NHL's first three-peat since the Islanders of the early 1980s.
Q 30Serena Williams stepped away from tennis after which 2022 tournament, a break that lasted until 2026?
US Open
The US Open was staged as her farewell: she beat the world number two there before losing in the third round, then came back to the tour in 2026, nearly four years later.