50 free 21st Century trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
44 free 21st century trivia questions with answers. The 21st century is only a quarter over, but it has already packed in more history than most: 9/11 and two wars, the iPhone and social media, a financial crash, a pandemic, popes from the Americas, private rockets landing on their tails and machines that talk back. This quiz covers the big moments of 2001 to 2025 in politics, science, technology, sport and culture. Expect questions on the tsunami and Katrina, Pluto's demotion, Phelps and Bolt, bitcoin's genesis block, the Arab Spring, Fukushima, the Higgs boson, Malala, Brexit, Leicester City and the Cubs, the first black hole photograph, Notre-Dame, COVID-19, the Ever Given, Webb, Queen Elizabeth II and ChatGPT. It works for a pub quiz round, a classroom current-affairs review or a family night arguing about what year things happened. Every answer has been checked against a primary source, mostly the relevant Wikipedia article, and the citation is attached to each question.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01In which year did the 21st century officially begin?
2001
Because there was no year zero, each century runs from year 1 to year 100. The famous millennium parties on New Year's Eve 1999 were technically a year early; the century ends on 31 December 2100.
Q 02Roughly how many people were killed in the September 11, 2001 attacks?
Nearly 3,000
Nineteen al-Qaeda hijackers seized four airliners: two hit the World Trade Center, one the Pentagon, and one came down in a field at Shanksville, Pennsylvania.
Q 03Dennis Tito made headlines in 2001 by becoming the world's first what?
Space tourist
The American businessman paid to fly to the International Space Station aboard a Russian Soyuz, opening the era of commercial spaceflight.
Q 04Which website, launched on January 15, 2001 by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger, became the go-to reference?
Wikipedia
It has been run since 2003 by the Wikimedia Foundation, a non-profit funded mainly by reader donations.
Q 05Euro banknotes and coins first entered circulation in which year?
2002
The euro had existed as an accounting currency since 1999. There are seven banknote denominations, from €5 to €500.
Q 06Which supersonic airliner made its last commercial flight on 24 October 2003?
Concorde
It cruised at Mach 2.02, more than twice the speed of ordinary jets. Only Air France and British Airways ever flew it, seven each, and a 2000 crash outside Paris hastened its retirement.
Q 07The Human Genome Project was declared complete on 14 April 2003. In which year had it started?
1990
It finished two years ahead of schedule with about 92% of the genome sequenced. The remaining gaps were not fully closed until the 2020s.
Q 08The 26 December 2004 earthquake and tsunami, the deadliest natural disaster of the century so far, was centred off the coast of which country?
Indonesia
The magnitude 9.2–9.3 quake struck off Aceh in northern Sumatra and killed an estimated 227,898 people in 14 countries.
Q 09Which social network was launched on February 4, 2004 under the name 'TheFacebook'?
YouTube followed a year later, founded on February 14, 2005 by Jawed Karim, Chad Hurley and Steve Chen.
Q 10Hurricane Katrina's storm surge broke the levees of which US city on August 29, 2005?
New Orleans
About 80% of the city flooded. With $125 billion in damage it remains America's costliest tropical cyclone; the death toll was revised to 1,392 in 2023.
Q 11Which body was demoted to dwarf-planet status when the IAU redefined 'planet' in 2006?
Pluto
It failed the new test of having cleared its orbital neighbourhood. NASA's New Horizons probe still flew past it on July 14, 2015, the first spacecraft to do so.
Q 12Steve Jobs unveiled the original iPhone at Macworld on January 9 of which year?
2007
He pitched it as three products in one: a widescreen iPod, a revolutionary phone and a breakthrough internet communicator. It went on sale that June.
Q 13At the 2008 Summer Olympics, Michael Phelps won how many gold medals, a record for a single Games?
Eight
He beat Mark Spitz's 1972 haul of seven. Phelps retired with 28 Olympic medals, 23 of them gold, the most of any athlete.
Q 21The Arab Spring uprisings began in December 2010 in which country?
Tunisia
They were sparked by the self-immolation of fruit seller Mohamed Bouazizi. Protests spread to Libya, Egypt, Yemen, Syria and Bahrain, toppling Ben Ali, Mubarak and Gaddafi.
Q 22Osama bin Laden was killed by US Navy SEALs on May 2, 2011 in a compound in which Pakistani city?
Abbottabad
Operation Neptune Spear took 40 minutes. His body was flown 850 miles to the Arabian Sea and buried there.
Q 23Which Japanese nuclear plant suffered a Level 7 accident in March 2011?
Fukushima Daiichi
The Tōhoku quake and wave knocked out the plant's grid connection and nearly all its backup power. Level 7 is the top of the international scale, matched only by Chernobyl.
Q 14Who was elected in November 2008 as America's first African American president?
Barack Obama
He beat John McCain by 365 electoral votes to 173, with Joe Biden as his running mate and Sarah Palin on the Republican ticket.
Q 15What name did bitcoin's pseudonymous creator use when mining the 'genesis block' on 3 January 2009?
Satoshi Nakamoto
The white paper had been posted on 31 October 2008. The first known purchase came in May 2010, when Laszlo Hanyecz paid 10,000 bitcoins for two Papa John's pizzas.
Q 16In which city did Usain Bolt set his 9.58-second 100 m world record at the 2009 World Championships?
Berlin
He also ran 19.19 for the 200 m at the same meet. Bolt won eight Olympic golds across the 2008, 2012 and 2016 Games.
Q 17Which 2009 James Cameron film overtook Titanic to become the highest-grossing movie of all time?
Avatar
Set on the moon Pandora among the blue-skinned Na'vi, it was the first film to gross more than $2 billion and finished near $2.9 billion.
Q 18In which city does the Burj Khalifa, the world's tallest structure, stand?
Dubai
It rises 829.8 m over 163 floors, with 2,909 stairs from the ground to the 160th floor.
Q 19In which country is Eyjafjallajökull, whose 2010 eruption shut most of Europe's airspace for six days?
Iceland
About 20 countries closed their skies from 15 to 20 April, stranding some 10 million travellers in the worst air-travel disruption since the Second World War.
Q 20The 2010 Deepwater Horizon disaster, the largest marine oil spill ever, happened in which body of water?
Gulf of Mexico
Eleven workers died in the explosion on the BP-operated rig, and about 4.9 million barrels leaked over 87 days before the well was capped on 15 July.
Q 24Which country became the world's newest sovereign state on 9 July 2011?
South Sudan
Its January 2011 independence referendum passed with 98.8% support. The capital is Juba.
Q 25NASA's car-sized Curiosity rover landed inside which Martian crater on August 6, 2012?
Gale
A rocket-powered 'sky crane' lowered it on a 20-metre tether. It has been exploring the crater and Mount Sharp ever since.
Q 26On 4 July 2012, CERN announced a new particle believed to be which long-sought boson?
Higgs
Peter Higgs and François Englert shared the 2013 Nobel Prize for predicting it. The 'God particle' nickname comes from a 1993 book and is disliked by physicists, Higgs included.
Q 27Jorge Mario Bergoglio, elected pope on 13 March 2013, was the first pope from which religious order?
The Jesuits
As Pope Francis he was also the first Latin American pope and the first born outside Europe since the 8th century. He died on 21 April 2025.
Q 28Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 vanished on 8 March 2014 en route from Kuala Lumpur to which city?
Beijing
The Boeing 777 carried 239 people. The first confirmed debris, a wing flaperon, washed up on Réunion in July 2015, and the cause remains undetermined.
Q 29Who became the youngest Nobel laureate ever when she shared the 2014 Peace Prize at age 17?
Malala Yousafzai
She had been shot by a Taliban gunman on a school bus in Pakistan's Swat Valley in October 2012. She shared the prize with Indian children's rights campaigner Kailash Satyarthi.
Q 30What did LIGO detect for the first time on 14 September 2015, confirming Einstein's prediction?
Gravitational waves
The signal came from two black holes merging about 1.4 billion light-years away. Rainer Weiss, Barry Barish and Kip Thorne shared the 2017 Nobel Prize in Physics for it.