130 free Aging & Elderly trivia questions with answers — science & nature quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
This aging and elderly trivia quiz covers the whole subject of growing old: the biology of ageing, the record-holding supercentenarians, life expectancy across history, and the customs, laws and institutions built around older people. The easy questions are ones most adults can reason out, such as what a centenarian is, which organisation sends AARP Magazine, why hair turns grey, and which country first introduced state retirement pensions. From there it digs deeper: the Hayflick limit and telomeres, progeria and Werner syndrome, the disputed blue zones, the Ig Nobel-winning study of pension fraud among the very old, Jeanne Calment's van Gogh story and her ill-fated apartment deal, the immortal jellyfish, the 500-year-old clam and the 200-year-old whale, plus Bismarck's pension age, the first Social Security cheque, Respect for the Aged Day in Japan and the origin of the term senior citizen. Difficulty runs from easy to expert so it works for a family night or a seniors' group as well as a pub quiz. Every answer was checked against the encyclopaedia entries on ageing, old age, longevity, gerontology and the individual people, diseases and laws named before publishing, and the supporting sentence is stored with each question. If you enjoy this one, try our Human Body and Medical History quizzes next.
30 of 130 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01How many living centenarians did the United Nations estimate worldwide in 2020?
573,000
That was almost four times the estimate for 2000.
Q 02From what age is a person classed as a supercentenarian?
110
Only about one in a thousand centenarians gets there.
Q 03Which Frenchwoman is the oldest person whose age has ever been verified?
Jeanne Calment
She outlived both her daughter and her grandson.
Q 04How old was the oldest verified person in history when she died in 1997?
122
Her lifespan is more than three years longer than the next-oldest documented person.
Q 05In which Provençal town was the world's oldest verified person born and did she spend her life?
Arles
Her father sat on the town council and her husband ran a drapery there.
Q 06Which painter did the oldest verified person claim to have met as a teenager in her uncle's shop?
Vincent van Gogh
She recalled him as ugly, ungracious and reeking of alcohol.
Q 07At 90, the oldest verified person sold her apartment as a life estate; what happened to the buyer?
He died before her, having paid over double its value
She remarked that in life one sometimes makes bad deals.
Q 08What did the oldest verified person do in 1985, at the age of 110?
Moved into a nursing home
She had lived on her own until then; the rap CD came in 1996.
Q 09What did the oldest verified person's husband reportedly die of in 1942?
Cherry poisoning
He was 73; the couple were double second cousins.
Q 10A 2018 hypothesis claimed the oldest verified person was really her daughter; what was the daughter's name?
Yvonne
Mainstream gerontologists consider the identity-switch theory weak.
Q 11Which Japanese man is the oldest man whose age has ever been verified?
Jiroemon Kimura
He was the last surviving man born in the 19th century.
Q 12How old was the oldest verified man when he died in 2013?
116
He is the only verified man to have reached that age.
Q 13For which employer did the oldest verified man work for more than fifty years?
The post office
He left school at 14 and retired at 65, then farmed until he was 90.
Q 14Which Japanese woman, who died in 2022 aged 119, is the second-oldest verified person ever?
Q 21Until what age did Ethel Caterham keep driving?
97
She played contract bridge well into her hundreds.
Q 22Which Dutchman was the first verified person to reach 110, in 1898?
Geert Adriaans Boomgaard
The oldest verified age did not pass 115 until the 1980s.
Q 23Roughly how many people in recorded history have indisputably reached 115?
About 80
Only three of them are men.
Q 24What is the term for someone aged 105 to 109?
Kane Tanaka
She was due to carry the Olympic torch in 2021 but withdrew because of COVID-19.
Q 15What business did the second-oldest verified person and her husband run in Fukuoka?
A noodle and sweet-soup shop
She retired from the store at 63 and later took up Othello and calligraphy.
Q 16Which Pennsylvanian is the oldest verified American ever, dying in 1999 at 119?
Sarah Knauss
Her daughter Kathryn lived to 101.
Q 17How many living generations did the oldest verified American's family span shortly before her death?
Six
Life magazine photographed her with a member of each generation in 1999.
Q 18In which US city was Maria Branyas, the world's oldest person until 2024, born?
San Francisco
Her Catalan family later returned to Spain and she lived to 117 in Olot.
Q 19Maria Branyas set what record in March 2020, aged 113?
Oldest person to recover from COVID-19
She played the piano until she was 108.
Q 20Ethel Caterham, who became the world's oldest living person in 2025, is a subject of which country?
United Kingdom
Born in 1909, she became the last surviving subject of King Edward VII.
Semisupercentenarian
The full 110-plus term has been in use since at least 1832.
Q 25Which organisation maintains the top-50 list of oldest verified living people?
Gerontology Research Group
It estimates there are 300 to 450 living supercentenarians worldwide.
Q 26A study finding that many centenarian counts are inflated by pension fraud won which award in 2024?
Ig Nobel Prize
In one blue zone, 82% of the supercentenarians turned out to be missing, imaginary or dead.
Q 27What was the term 'blue zone' originally derived from?
Researchers' pen colour on a survey map
Sardinia's Nuoro province was the first proposed zone.
Q 28Which Costa Rican region is one of the suggested blue zones?
Nicoya Peninsula
Later research found people born there after 1930 had no exceptional longevity.
Q 29Which Greek island is counted among the suggested blue zones?
Icaria
The concept is widely challenged as unproven.
Q 30Who introduced the blue zones concept in 2005 and later formed a company around it?
Dan Buettner
Blue Zones LLC was formed in 2008 and acquired by Adventist Health in 2020.