60th Birthday
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50 free 60th Birthday trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
A 60th birthday is one of the big ones. In parts of East Asia it has long been treated as the completion of a full turn of the calendar, and everywhere else it is a fine excuse for a party, a toast and a few good-natured jokes about getting older. This quiz is built for that party. Half of it plays with the number itself: where our clocks got their sixties, what a 60th anniversary is called, and the sporting feats, films, molecules and lines on the map that all turn on sixty. The other half heads back to the 1960s, because a 60th is the perfect excuse for a Sixties theme: Moon shots, miniskirts, Motown and the first prime-time cartoons. The questions are pitched for a mixed room, so guests of any age can join in, and every answer comes with a short explanation worth reading aloud. Use it as a party game, split the room into teams, or try it yourself before the cake comes out.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which gemstone names the 60th wedding anniversary, the first to earn Commonwealth couples a royal message?
Diamond
Diamond follows ruby at 40 years and gold at 50, and the same gem names a jubilee held after 60 years on a throne or in business.
Q 02Which ancient people inherited base-60 counting from the Sumerians and handed down our 60-minute hour?
Babylonians
Babylonians worked in base 60, a good fit for clocks: 60 is the smallest number that divides evenly by every number from one to six.
Q 03Which Los Angeles Lakers star scored 60 points against the Utah Jazz in the final game of his career?
Kobe Bryant
Kobe Bryant took a career-high 50 shots that night and outscored the whole Jazz team 23–21 in the fourth quarter of a 101–96 win.
Q 04Which party game became a hit after Eva Gabor played it with Johnny Carson on The Tonight Show in 1966?
Twister
Twister was the first popular American game to use the players' own bodies as playing pieces, and rival toy firms attacked Milton Bradley for selling something too racy.
Q 05Which fast-food founder was 65 and living on Social Security when he took to the road selling franchises?
Colonel Sanders
Colonel Sanders sold his Kentucky restaurant after a new interstate drained its traffic, then collected a few cents for every chicken his franchise partners sold.
Q 06Which television host introduced the Beatles to more than 73 million American viewers in February 1964?
Ed Sullivan
Ed Sullivan booked the band for three shows, two live and one taped, and the first of them is credited with launching American Beatlemania.
Q 07Which Beatle wrote the melody of When I'm Sixty-Four at about age 14, a decade before Sgt. Pepper?
Paul McCartney
Paul McCartney came up with the tune around 1956, when he assumed he would end up writing for cabaret instead of rock and roll.
Q 08Which New York Yankees slugger hit 60 home runs in 1927, a record that stood until Roger Maris hit 61?
Babe Ruth
Babe Ruth beat his own record by one that year, hitting number 60 off Tom Zachary on September 30 to break a 2–2 tie in the eighth inning.
Q 09Which animal opens the Chinese zodiac, whose full cycle of animals and elements takes 60 years to complete?
Rat
Rat comes first because, in the best-known folk tale, it crossed the river on the back of the Ox and jumped off just ahead at the finish.
Q 10Which 1969 music festival was held on Max Yasgur's dairy farm in Bethel, New York?
Woodstock
Woodstock kept the name of an artists' town in the next county; the concert moved to the farm after the town of Wallkill shut it out only weeks before opening day.
Q 11Which British monarch marked 60 years on the throne in June 1897 with a grand procession through London?
Queen Victoria
Queen Victoria was by then the longest-reigning monarch in British history, and the day was declared a bank holiday in Britain, Ireland and India.
Q 12Which word, built on the Latin for sixty each, describes a person between 60 and 69 years old?
Sexagenarian
Sexagenarian comes from the Latin sexagenarius, meaning containing sixty; a plainer modern synonym is sixtysomething.
Q 13In which country is a 60th birthday called hwangap, traditionally a feast paid for by the children?
Korea
Korea counts the hwangap by international age, so the guest of honour is already 61 in traditional reckoning, and seaweed soup called miyeok-guk must be on the table.
Q 21Which type of triangle, the usual shape of a pool-ball rack, has three interior angles of 60 degrees?
Equilateral
Equilateral triangles also give the yield road sign its outline, and their three sides are always the same length as each other.
Q 22Which country decreed a ten-hour day with 100-minute hours in 1793, briefly abandoning the 60-minute hour?
France
France made decimal time official during its Revolution, but the idea never caught on and mandatory use was suspended in April 1795.
Q 23Which medical term, from the Greek for slow heart, describes a resting pulse under 60 beats per minute?
Bradycardia
Bradycardia is not always a worry: rates below 50 are often normal during sleep in healthy young adults and athletes.
Q 14Which Roman numeral for sixty labelled the Super Bowl played at Levi's Stadium in February 2026?
LX
LX puts L for 50 ahead of X for 10; reverse the two letters and the smaller numeral is subtracted, so XL means 40.
Q 15In which pub sport is 60 the most a single throw can earn, for landing in the treble 20?
Darts
Darts pays more for that narrow band than for the bullseye, which is worth 50; three treble 20s make 180, the highest score from one turn.
Q 16Which American network launched the newsmagazine 60 Minutes, known for its on-screen stopwatch, in 1968?
CBS
CBS began the programme as a bi-weekly Tuesday show hosted by Mike Wallace and Harry Reasoner, alternating with its other news productions.
Q 17Which actor plays reformed car thief Memphis Raines in the 2000 action film Gone in 60 Seconds?
Nicolas Cage
Nicolas Cage's character has to steal 50 luxury cars to save his brother, in a loose remake of H. B. Halicki's 1974 film of the same name.
Q 18Which metal, atomic number 60, makes the powerful magnets in audio gear, hard drives and wind turbines?
Neodymium
Neodymium is combined with iron and boron to make permanent magnets that produce strong fields from small, lightweight parts, including electric car motors.
Q 19The 60-carbon molecule shaped like a soccer ball is named after which American architect of geodesic domes?
Buckminster Fuller
Buckminster Fuller designed domes whose lattice the molecule resembles, and chemists nicknamed the 60-atom cages buckyballs.
Q 20Which 1959 agreement reserves all land south of 60 degrees south latitude for peaceful science?
Antarctic Treaty
The Antarctic Treaty was the first arms control agreement of the Cold War, banning military activity and making the continent a scientific preserve.
Q 24Which biblical patriarch was 60 years old when his wife Rebekah gave birth to the twins Esau and Jacob?
Isaac
Isaac prayed for Rebekah after many childless years of marriage, and Genesis says the twins struggled with each other even in the womb.
Q 25Which sport's professional games last 60 minutes of play, split into three 20-minute periods?
Ice hockey
Ice hockey stops the clock whenever the puck is out of play, so a 60-minute game takes about two hours and twenty minutes from the opening face-off.
Q 26Which Apollo 11 astronaut stayed in lunar orbit while Armstrong and Aldrin walked on the Moon?
Michael Collins
Michael Collins circled the Moon thirty times on the 1969 mission, three years after making two spacewalks on Gemini 10.
Q 27Which Republican faced John F. Kennedy in a Chicago TV studio in 1960 for the first US presidential debate?
Richard Nixon
Richard Nixon and Kennedy debated four times that autumn, and no presidential candidates met in a debate again until 1976.
Q 28Which Canadian actor first played Captain James T. Kirk when Star Trek reached television in 1966?
William Shatner
William Shatner took command of the Enterprise in the show's second pilot and kept the role through seven feature films, ending with Star Trek Generations.
Q 29Which London designer gave the miniskirt its name, after her favourite make of car, the Mini?
Mary Quant
Mary Quant is often called the style's inventor, a claim rivals dispute; she said the girls shopping on the King's Road kept asking for shorter hems.
Q 30Which nation won the 1966 World Cup after Geoff Hurst struck a hat-trick in the final?
England
England needed extra time to win 4–2, and no other man scored three in a World Cup final until Kylian Mbappé in 2022.