2025 Trivia
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50 free 2025 trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
This 2025 trivia quiz is a year-in-review test of the stories that made the headlines. It runs month by month: the Los Angeles wildfires and the DeepSeek stock shock in January, the Potomac mid-air collision, Firefly's Blue Ghost landing on the Moon, the death of Pope Francis and the election of Leo XIV, Eurovision in Basel, the Air India 787 crash, the US strikes on Iranian nuclear sites, the Kamchatka earthquake, Charlie Kirk's assassination, the Louvre crown-jewel heist, Hurricane Melissa, Japan's first female prime minister, and the Nobel Prizes. The easy questions are the ones everyone remembers: who became pope, which rocket company finally landed its booster, which country won Eurovision. The harder ones ask which pharaoh's tomb was found, how many cardinals voted in the conclave, which city the UN said had overtaken Tokyo, and who won the Chopin Competition. If you want the previous year, our 2024 trivia quiz is the companion page. Every answer was checked against the encyclopaedia's year-in-review entries before publishing, and the sentence that supports it is stored with each question.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which country became a full member of BRICS on January 6, 2025?
Indonesia
Indonesia, Southeast Asia's most populous country, joined weeks after Donald Trump threatened 100% tariffs on BRICS members if they moved to replace the dollar. The bloc had approved its bid in 2023.
Q 02Which metropolitan area suffered the most destructive wildfires in its history in January 2025?
Greater Los Angeles
Greater Los Angeles burned as Santa Ana winds gusting to nearly 100 mph drove the Palisades and Eaton fires through hills left dry by months of drought.
Q 03Which Chinese chatbot's rise wiped almost $600 billion off Nvidia's value in one day in January 2025?
DeepSeek
DeepSeek had just topped Apple's US App Store, and reports that it was built at a fraction of rivals' costs made investors doubt demand for Nvidia's chips. No US company had ever lost so much value in a day.
Q 04Which comic-strip character's 1929 debut entered the US public domain on January 1, 2025?
Popeye
Popeye first appeared in the Thimble Theatre strip in January 1929, so that version is now free to use. He did not credit spinach for his strength until 1931.
Q 05Which country became the first in Southeast Asia to legalize same-sex marriage in January 2025?
Thailand
Thailand's law took effect on January 23, 2025, and hundreds of couples married that same day, many at a mass wedding that city officials helped stage in a Bangkok shopping mall.
Q 06A US Army Black Hawk collided with a regional jet near which airport on January 29, 2025?
Washington National
Washington National's helicopter corridor left as little as 75 feet between helicopters and jets landing on runway 33, investigators found. All 67 people on the two aircraft died.
Q 07Who was appointed president of Syria in January 2025 after leading the rebels who toppled Bashar al-Assad?
Ahmed al-Sharaa
Ahmed al-Sharaa led the Islamist group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham. The US had offered $10 million for his arrest and scrapped the reward only in December 2024, weeks before he became president.
Q 08Which team beat the Kansas City Chiefs 40–22 in Super Bowl LIX in February 2025?
Philadelphia Eagles
The Philadelphia Eagles sacked Patrick Mahomes six times without calling a single blitz, denying Kansas City what would have been the first run of three straight Super Bowl wins.
Q 09Egypt hailed Thutmose II's tomb, announced in February 2025, as the first pharaoh's tomb found since whose a century earlier?
Tutankhamun
Tutankhamun's tomb was found in 1922, though Psusennes I's turned up intact in 1940, which undercuts the boast. Thutmose II's was identified from alabaster vessels naming him and his wife Hatshepsut.
Q 10Which country's 2025 constitutional reform made spouses Daniel Ortega and Rosario Murillo its co-presidents?
Nicaragua
Nicaragua's reform raised Murillo from vice president to rule beside her husband, and it also stretched the presidential term from five years to six.
Q 11Which company's Blue Ghost made the first fully successful commercial Moon landing in March 2025?
Firefly Aerospace
Firefly Aerospace's lander came to rest stable and upright on March 2, 2025. A year earlier Intuitive Machines had become the first private firm to land on the Moon, only for its craft to tip onto its side.
Q 12Which former Philippine president was arrested in March 2025 on an International Criminal Court warrant?
Rodrigo Duterte
Rodrigo Duterte was seized at Manila's airport as he flew home from Hong Kong and put on a chartered jet to The Hague that night, to answer for thousands of killings in his anti-drug crackdown.
Q 13Which former swimmer was elected president of the International Olympic Committee in March 2025?
Q 21Who became Chancellor of Germany in May 2025 only after losing the first round of parliamentary voting?
Friedrich Merz
Friedrich Merz fell six votes short on the first ballot even though his coalition held 328 seats, a failure without precedent in post-war Germany. He won a second vote hours later with 325.
Q 22What papal name did Robert Francis Prevost take after the May 2025 conclave?
Leo XIV
Leo XIV said he chose the name to follow Leo XIII, the pope who defended workers during the industrial revolution, because artificial intelligence now poses a new challenge to human dignity and labour.
Q 23The pope elected in May 2025 was born in which American city?
Chicago
Kirsty Coventry
Kirsty Coventry, Zimbabwe's double Olympic backstroke champion, won exactly the 49 votes she needed in the first round of a seven-way race tipped to run several rounds. She is the first woman and first African in the job.
Q 14A 7.7-magnitude earthquake on March 28, 2025, killed thousands of people in which country?
Myanmar
Myanmar's military rulers, who seized power in a 2021 coup and usually shun outside help, made a rare appeal for international aid after the quake flattened buildings around Mandalay.
Q 15Which pop star flew to the edge of space in April 2025 on Blue Origin's all-female flight?
Katy Perry
Katy Perry kissed the ground after the 11-minute trip with five other women, among them TV host Gayle King. Blue Origin called it the first all-female spaceflight since Valentina Tereshkova flew alone in 1963.
Q 16Colossal Biosciences claimed in April 2025 to have revived which extinct animal?
Dire wolf
The dire wolf pups were born to dog surrogates after 20 edits to 14 grey wolf genes. Colossal's own chief scientist later conceded they are 'grey wolves with 20 edits'.
Q 17Astronomers reported possible signs of life on exoplanet K2-18b in April 2025 using which space telescope?
Webb
The James Webb Space Telescope picked up hints of gases that on Earth come from marine plankton and bacteria. The signal reached only 'three sigma', well short of what scientists need to claim a discovery.
Q 18Pope Francis died in 2025 the morning after his final public appearance on which Christian feast?
Easter
On Easter Sunday the 88-year-old greeted the crowd from the balcony of St Peter's and toured the square in his popemobile. He died of a stroke at 7:35 the next morning.
Q 19Who became Prime Minister of Canada in 2025 after Justin Trudeau's resignation?
Mark Carney
Mark Carney had never held elected office: he had run the Bank of Canada and then the Bank of England, as its first non-British governor. Weeks after being sworn in, he won a snap election.
Q 20A blackout on April 28, 2025, cut power for hours across which two countries?
Spain and Portugal
Spain and Portugal went dark when about 15 gigawatts, some 60% of Spain's demand at the time, dropped off the grid within five seconds. Passengers had to be evacuated from stranded trains.
Chicago-born Robert Prevost spent years in Peru, became bishop of Chiclayo and took Peruvian citizenship in 2015, before becoming the first pope from the United States.
Q 24Which Swiss city hosted the Eurovision Song Contest 2025?
Basel
Basel staged the contest because Nemo had won for Switzerland a year earlier with 'The Code'. The country also hosted the very first Eurovision, in 1956.
Q 25Which country's contestant JJ won Eurovision 2025?
Austria
Austria's JJ won on the juries' votes with 'Wasted Love', while Israel topped the public vote and finished second. Pre-contest favourites Sweden came fourth.
Q 26What was the code name of Ukraine's June 2025 drone attack on air bases deep inside Russia?
Operation Spiderweb
Operation Spiderweb took 18 months to prepare: Ukraine smuggled 117 small drones into Russia, hid them under the roofs of wooden cabins on lorries and launched them by remote control near the bases.
Q 27Who won South Korea's June 2025 presidential election, held after Yoon Suk Yeol was removed from office?
Lee Jae Myung
Lee Jae Myung had lost the 2022 election to Yoon by just 0.73 points, the closest presidential race in South Korea's history, and survived a stabbing in the neck in 2024.
Q 28Air India Flight 171, which crashed seconds after take-off in June 2025, was which type of aircraft?
Boeing 787 Dreamliner
The Boeing 787 Dreamliner hit a medical college in Ahmedabad less than a minute after take-off, the type's first fatal accident. Of 242 people aboard, only the man in seat 11A walked away.
Q 29Which club won the first 32-team FIFA Club World Cup, held in the United States in 2025?
Chelsea
Chelsea stunned Champions League winners Paris Saint-Germain 3–0 in the final in New Jersey. Cole Palmer scored twice in eight minutes, and all three goals came before half-time.
Q 30US forces struck three Iranian nuclear sites on June 22, 2025: Natanz, Isfahan and which third location?
Fordow
Fordow is built deep inside a mountain, so B-2 bombers dropped 30,000-pound 'bunker buster' bombs down its ventilation shafts. A Pentagon team had spent 15 years studying the site.