21st Century Trivia
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47 free 21st Century trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Oct 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 47 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Why do purists say the 21st century began in 2001 rather than 2000?
The calendar has no year zero
The calendar has no year zero. It runs straight from 1 BC to AD 1, so the first century only ended with the year 100, and every century since has ended on a '00' year, not begun on one.
Q 02Roughly how many people were killed in the September 11, 2001 attacks?
Nearly 3,000
Nearly 3,000. Of the 2,977 victims, 40 were aboard Flight 93, whose passengers fought the hijackers; the plane came down in a Pennsylvania field, about 20 minutes' flying time from Washington.
Q 03In 2001 Dennis Tito became the first space tourist, paying a reported $20 million to visit which destination?
The International Space Station
The International Space Station. His first deal was for a trip to Russia's Mir, which fell through when the ageing station was scrapped, and NASA then advised against flying him at all.
Q 04Wikipedia, launched in January 2001, takes the 'wiki' in its name from which language's word for 'quick'?
Hawaiian
Hawaiian. Programmer Ward Cunningham, who built the first wiki in 1995, learned the word when a Honolulu airport agent sent him to the 'wiki wiki' bus that ran between terminals.
Q 05Which large EU economy kept its own currency when euro cash arrived in 2002?
Britain
Britain. It had secured an opt-out when the single currency was agreed at Maastricht in 1992, so the pound stayed while the mark, the lira and the peseta were withdrawn.
Q 06Which airline operated Concorde's last commercial flight, on 24 October 2003?
British Airways
British Airways. Air France had retired its Concordes that May, and when Richard Branson offered to buy BA's for £1 to keep them flying with Virgin, BA said they were not for sale.
Q 07Who unveiled the Human Genome Project's first draft with Tony Blair?
Bill Clinton
Bill Clinton. In June 2000 he called the draft 'the most important, most wondrous map ever produced by humankind', with the heads of the rival public and private sequencing teams beside him.
Q 08The 26 December 2004 earthquake and tsunami was centred off the coast of which country?
Indonesia
Indonesia. The quake struck off Sumatra, and unlike the Pacific, the Indian Ocean had no tsunami warning network to alert the coasts in its path; one was up and running 18 months later.
Q 09Which social network, launched in February 2004, was at first open only to students at one university?
Facebook. Mark Zuckerberg coded 'thefacebook.com' in about a week, three months after Harvard's disciplinary board called him in over Facemash, his site for rating classmates' photos.
Q 10Which New Orleans stadium served as a 'shelter of last resort' for thousands of residents during Hurricane Katrina in 2005?
The Superdome
The Superdome. With no power or clean water, conditions inside collapsed within days, and its evacuees were bused to another stadium altogether: the Astrodome in Houston.
Q 11Which NASA probe set off for Pluto in January 2006, months before its target was reclassified as a dwarf planet?
New Horizons
New Horizons. It left Earth bound for the ninth planet, astronomers voted that title away seven months into the flight, and the probe flew on for nine years to reach Pluto in July 2015.
Q 12Which carrier was the exclusive US network for the first iPhone in 2007?
AT&T
AT&T. Apple had signed the deal with Cingular, which took the AT&T name before launch, so American buyers had no choice of network until a Verizon iPhone arrived in February 2011.
Q 13Michael Phelps's eight golds at the 2008 Olympics beat whose record for a single Games?
Mark Spitz
Q 21The Arab Spring uprisings began in December 2010 in which country?
Tunisia
Tunisia: the self-immolation of street vendor Mohamed Bouazizi on 17 December 2010 sparked protests that toppled Ben Ali, then spread to Egypt, Libya, Yemen, Syria and Bahrain.
Q 22Osama bin Laden was killed by US Navy SEALs on May 2, 2011 in a compound in which Pakistani city?
Abbottabad
Abbottabad. The world's most wanted man had been living about a kilometre from Pakistan's top military academy, in a quiet garrison town; the raid on his walled compound took some 40 minutes.
Q 23Which earlier disaster is the only nuclear accident besides Fukushima in 2011 to be rated Level 7, the scale's maximum?
Chernobyl
Mark Spitz. His seven golds from 1972 were matched only when Phelps won the 100 m butterfly by one hundredth of a second, 50.58 to 50.59; a relay the next day brought the eighth.
Q 14Which Republican did Barack Obama defeat in the November 2008 US presidential election?
John McCain
John McCain. Weeks before the vote he took the microphone from a supporter at his own rally who called Obama 'an Arab', telling the crowd his rival was 'a decent family man'.
Q 15What name did bitcoin's pseudonymous creator use when mining the 'genesis block' on 3 January 2009?
Satoshi Nakamoto
Satoshi Nakamoto. Whoever is behind the name hid a message in that first block, a headline from The Times of 3 January 2009: 'Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks'.
Q 16Usain Bolt set the 100 m world record in 2009 in which city's Olympic Stadium?
Berlin
Berlin. He ran 9.58 on the track where Jesse Owens won four golds in 1936, and the city's mayor thanked him with a painted, three-ton slab of the Berlin Wall to take home to Jamaica.
Q 17Which film became the first to gross more than $2 billion at the worldwide box office, in January 2010?
Avatar
Avatar. James Cameron beat his own 12-year-old box-office record with it, and re-releases have since lifted the film's worldwide total past $2.9 billion.
Q 18In which city does the Burj Khalifa, completed in 2010, stand?
Dubai
Dubai. Until opening night it was the Burj Dubai; the emirate's ruler then renamed it for Sheikh Khalifa of neighbouring Abu Dhabi, which had just lent Dubai $10 billion to cover its debts.
Q 19In which country is Eyjafjallajökull, the volcano whose 2010 ash cloud grounded flights across much of Europe?
Iceland
Iceland. The eruption broke out beneath the mountain's ice cap, and meltwater flashing to steam blasted fine ash up into the jet stream; fearing damage to jet engines, regulators closed the skies.
Q 20The 2010 Deepwater Horizon rig explosion and oil spill happened in which body of water?
Gulf of Mexico
Gulf of Mexico. Eleven workers died in the blast and oil flowed from the seabed well for 87 days; a US court later found BP grossly negligent, and the company agreed a record-setting settlement.
Chernobyl. The two share the top rung although Fukushima released only a fraction as much radioactive material, one reason critics say the scale lumps very different disasters together.
Q 24Which country became the world's newest sovereign state on 9 July 2011?
South Sudan
South Sudan. Independence from Sudan was the prize of a deal that ended Africa's longest-running civil war, but peace did not hold: within three years the new state was fighting one of its own.
Q 25On 4 July 2012, CERN announced a new particle believed to be which long-sought boson?
Higgs
Higgs. In 1964 a journal rejected Peter Higgs's paper setting out the idea, so he added a paragraph predicting a new particle and sent it elsewhere; CERN announced that particle 48 years later.
Q 26Jorge Mario Bergoglio, elected pope on 13 March 2013, was the first pope from which religious order?
The Jesuits
The Jesuits. Yet he named himself after the founder of another order, Francis of Assisi: as the winning votes came in, a cardinal hugged him and said, 'Don't forget the poor!'
Q 27Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 vanished on 8 March 2014 en route from Kuala Lumpur to which city?
Beijing
Beijing. The jet never came close: radar showed it turning back west across Malaysia, and satellite signals put its last hours far to the south, over the Indian Ocean off Australia.
Q 28Who became the youngest Nobel laureate ever when she shared the 2014 Peace Prize at age 17?
Malala Yousafzai
Malala Yousafzai, shot by a Taliban gunman on her school bus in Pakistan's Swat Valley in October 2012, shared the 2014 Peace Prize with Indian children's rights campaigner Kailash Satyarthi.
Q 29What did LIGO detect for the first time on 14 September 2015, confirming Einstein's prediction?
Gravitational waves
Gravitational waves. They came from two black holes that collided over a billion years ago and, for an instant, radiated more power than all the stars in the visible universe combined.
Q 30What did SpaceX's Falcon 9 do in December 2015 that no orbital rocket had done before?
Landed its main stage upright
Landed its main stage upright. It was SpaceX's first launch since a Falcon 9 had broken apart in flight six months earlier, and the booster came back to a pad near its launch site.