2023 Events Trivia
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109 free 2023 Events trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
This 2023 events trivia quiz is the year in review for people who followed the news rather than the red carpet. Seventy-three questions cover the world events of 2023: the bank failures of March, the Turkey–Syria earthquake, the Wagner mutiny, the coups in Niger and Gabon, the elections that put Milei, Noboa, Tusk and Wilders on the front page, the first Starship launch, the first landing near the Moon's south pole, the Nobel Prizes, the AI Safety Summit and the COP28 deal to transition away from fossil fuels. Sport gets its share too: the Women's World Cup, the Rugby and Cricket World Cups, the World Baseball Classic and Léon Marchand's swim into the record books. The easy questions ask which country overtook China in population and which company launched GPT-4; the hard ones want the town of the Nepal air crash, the bloc Somalia joined and the missile system behind the first interception in space. It suits pub quiz teams, news addicts, classrooms doing a year-in-review and anyone who wants to check how much of 2023 actually stuck. Films, music and celebrity gossip live on our separate 2023 pop culture quiz. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's article on the year 2023, and each question carries the sentence that backs it up.
30 of 109 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which country adopted the euro and joined the Schengen Area on January 1, 2023?
Croatia
Croatia became the 20th euro-area member and the 27th Schengen state on 1 January 2023, the first eurozone enlargement since Lithuania in 2015.
Q 02Which country became NATO's 31st member on April 4, 2023, doubling its border with Russia?
Finland
Finland, whose 1,340 km frontier with Russia roughly doubled the alliance's land border with Russia, became NATO's 31st member on 4 April 2023, less than a year after applying.
Q 03Which US lender failed on March 10, 2023, the largest such failure since 2008?
Silicon Valley Bank
Silicon Valley Bank, then the 16th-largest US bank, was closed by California regulators on 10 March 2023 after a deposit run triggered by losses on its bond holdings.
Q 04Which San Francisco lender did the FDIC seize and sell to JPMorgan Chase in May 2023?
First Republic Bank
First Republic Bank was seized on 1 May 2023 and sold to JPMorgan Chase, the second-largest bank failure in US history behind Washington Mutual in 2008.
Q 05Which bank bought Credit Suisse for 3 billion francs in a Swiss-brokered deal in March 2023?
UBS
UBS agreed on 19 March 2023 to buy Credit Suisse for about 3 billion Swiss francs in an all-share deal brokered by the Swiss government, ending the 167-year history of a rival founded in 1856.
Q 06Which country overtook the long-time leader in April 2023 to become the world's most populous?
India
India became the world's most populous country in United Nations estimates in April 2023, with about 1.43 billion people, after decades of faster growth than the previous leader.
Q 07Which company launched GPT-4, a large language model that could respond to images, on March 14, 2023?
OpenAI
OpenAI released GPT-4 on 14 March 2023; the model accepted images as well as text and could handle over 25,000 words of text, far more than its predecessor GPT-3.5.
Q 08What did Google DeepMind name the language model it released on December 6, 2023?
Gemini
Gemini, announced on 6 December 2023 in Ultra, Pro and Nano sizes, was Google DeepMind's first natively multimodal model; the Bard chatbot was renamed Gemini in February 2024.
Q 09Which SpaceX rocket first flew on 20 April 2023 and exploded about four minutes after liftoff?
Starship
Starship, SpaceX's two-stage super heavy-lift rocket, lifted off from Starbase in Texas on 20 April 2023; its stages failed to separate and the vehicle was destroyed about four minutes into flight.
Q 10Which space agency's Chandrayaan-3 was the first spacecraft to land near the Moon's south pole, in 2023?
ISRO
ISRO's Chandrayaan-3 set its Vikram lander down near the Moon's south pole on 23 August 2023 and deployed the Pragyan rover, the first soft landing in that polar region.
Q 11What record did Freddy, the storm that formed in the Indian Ocean in February 2023, go on to set?
Longest-lasting tropical cyclone ever
'Longest-lasting tropical cyclone ever' was confirmed by the WMO in 2024: Freddy lasted 36 days, crossed the entire Indian Ocean and killed more than 1,400 people in southeastern Africa.
Q 12Which country, along with Turkey, was devastated by the magnitude 7.8 earthquake of February 6, 2023?
Syria
Syria's north-west, around Aleppo and Idlib, was hit alongside southern Turkey on 6 February 2023; the combined death toll passed 50,000, and a second major quake struck hours later.
Q 13Which North African country's 8 September 2023 earthquake killed at least 2,960 people?
Q 21In February 2023 Russia suspended its participation in which nuclear arms reduction treaty with the US?
New START
New START, signed in 2010 and extended to February 2026, was suspended by Russia on 21 February 2023; it was the last remaining nuclear arms-control treaty between the two countries.
Q 22President Mohamed Bazoum was overthrown in a July 2023 coup in which country?
Niger
Niger's presidential guard detained Mohamed Bazoum on 26 July 2023; General Abdourahamane Tchiani declared himself leader and France announced in September that its 1,500 troops would leave.
Q 23An August 30, 2023 coup ended the Bongo family's 56-year rule in which Central African country?
Gabon
Morocco
Morocco's deadliest earthquake since 1960 struck the High Atlas south-west of Marrakesh on 8 September 2023; the official toll was 2,960 dead and the old city of Marrakesh was damaged.
Q 14Two dams collapsed above Derna after Storm Daniel in 2023, destroying a quarter of the city, in which country?
Libya
Libya's port city of Derna lost whole neighbourhoods on 10–11 September 2023 when the Derna and Abu Mansour dams failed; the confirmed death toll exceeded 4,000 with thousands more missing.
Q 15Wildfires that killed at least 101 people in August 2023 struck which Hawaiian island?
Maui
Maui's historic town of Lahaina was almost entirely destroyed on 8 August 2023 by wind-driven wildfires; the death toll of more than 100 made it the deadliest US wildfire in over a century.
Q 16Near which resort city did Hurricane Otis make landfall on 25 October 2023?
Acapulco
Acapulco took a direct hit from Otis, which came ashore as a Category 5 with 165 mph winds, the strongest landfall on record for Mexico's Pacific coast, surpassing Patricia in 2015.
Q 17The Sycamore Gap Tree, illegally felled in September 2023, stood beside which ancient structure?
Hadrian's Wall
Hadrian's Wall runs along the ridge where the Sycamore Gap Tree grew in Northumberland; the tree, filmed in 1991's Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, was cut down overnight on 27–28 September 2023.
Q 18Which mercenary chief led a June 2023 mutiny against Russia's military, then died in a plane crash two months later?
Yevgeny Prigozhin
Yevgeny Prigozhin's Wagner column came within about 200 km of Moscow on 24 June 2023 before halting; he died when his jet crashed in Tver region on 23 August 2023.
Q 19Which leader brokered the deal that ended the one-day mercenary mutiny in Russia in June 2023?
Alexander Lukashenko
Alexander Lukashenko, Belarus's president, negotiated the 24 June 2023 deal under which the Wagner leader halted his march and agreed to move to Belarus; that May his country had agreed to host Russian tactical nuclear weapons.
Q 20Which sitting head of state did the ICC issue an arrest warrant for on 17 March 2023?
Vladimir Putin
Vladimir Putin was charged by the ICC on 17 March 2023 with the unlawful deportation of Ukrainian children, the first warrant against a sitting leader of a permanent UN Security Council member.
Gabon's military, led by General Brice Oligui Nguema, seized power on 30 August 2023 minutes after Ali Bongo Ondimba was declared re-elected; his father Omar had taken office in 1967.
Q 24Bola Tinubu was elected president of which West African country in February 2023?
Nigeria
Nigeria elected Bola Tinubu of the All Progressives Congress on 25 February 2023 with about 37% of the vote, ahead of Atiku Abubakar and Labour's Peter Obi.
Q 25Javier Milei won the presidential runoff of which country on November 19, 2023?
Argentina
Argentina's Javier Milei beat Economy Minister Sergio Massa with about 56% in the 19 November 2023 runoff and took office on 10 December with Victoria Villarruel as vice president.
Q 26Daniel Noboa won a snap presidential election in which South American country in October 2023?
Ecuador
Ecuador held the snap vote after President Guillermo Lasso dissolved congress in May 2023; Noboa, 35, heir to a banana fortune, beat Luisa González in the October runoff.
Q 27Bernardo Arévalo of the Semilla movement was elected president of which country in August 2023?
Guatemala
Guatemala's Bernardo Arévalo, son of former president Juan José Arévalo, won the 20 August 2023 runoff against Sandra Torres by a wide margin; prosecutors then spent months trying to suspend his Semilla party.
Q 28Who succeeded Jacinda Ardern as Prime Minister of New Zealand on January 25, 2023?
Chris Hipkins
Chris Hipkins, then education and police minister, was sworn in on 25 January 2023 after Ardern's 19 January announcement that she no longer had 'enough in the tank'.
Q 29In which country did Geert Wilders' Party for Freedom win the most seats in a November 2023 election?
The Netherlands
The Netherlands went to the polls on 22 November 2023 after Mark Rutte's coalition collapsed over migration that July; Wilders' PVV took 37 of 150 seats, its best ever result.
Q 30Donald Tusk replaced Mateusz Morawiecki as prime minister of which country in December 2023?
Poland
Law and Justice had won the most seats in October but lost its majority to a broad opposition coalition.