Arizona Trivia
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7correct to beat the crowd
This Arizona trivia quiz has 119 free questions with answers and covers the whole state: how it got its name and its Valentine's Day statehood, the territorial capitals before Phoenix, the Gadsden Purchase, Geronimo and the Gunfight at the O.K. Corral, and the natural landmarks everyone has seen in photos, from the Grand Canyon and Monument Valley to Antelope Canyon, Havasu Falls and Meteor Crater. There are questions on the state symbols (the bird, the tree, the neckwear and the surprisingly recent state planet), on why most of Arizona never changes its clocks, on the London Bridge that ended up in Lake Havasu City, and on sports, from the Diamondbacks' 2001 World Series to spring training and the Coyotes' departure. Famous Arizonans such as Barry Goldwater, Sandra Day O'Connor, John McCain and Cesar Chavez appear too. It works for a family road trip, a classroom, or a trivia night. Every answer has been checked against Wikipedia or a primary source, and each question links to the page that confirms it.
30 of 119 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Arizona became the 48th state in February 1912, on which holiday?
Valentine's Day
Valentine's Day. The date gave Arizona a second nickname, the Valentine State; it was the last of the 48 contiguous states to join the Union.
Q 02Which Arizona desert lizard's saliva gave scientists the hormone behind the drug family that includes Ozempic?
Gila monster
Gila monster. Its hormone works for hours where the human version breaks down in minutes, so it became exenatide, the diabetes drug approved in 2005.
Q 03Which deal with Mexico added Arizona's southern strip to the United States?
Gadsden Purchase
The Gadsden Purchase. The United States paid $10 million for the strip because the only workable routes for a southern railroad to the Pacific ran through it.
Q 04Which government was first to formally organize an Arizona Territory, in 1862?
The Confederate States
The Confederate States. Their Arizona was the southern half of New Mexico Territory; a year later the Union drew its own Arizona Territory as the western half instead.
Q 05Which town, home of Whiskey Row and the World's Oldest Rodeo, became Arizona's territorial capital in 1864?
Prescott
Prescott. It lost the capital to a southern rival after three years, won it back a decade later, then lost it for good to Phoenix.
Q 06Phoenix was named for a city rising from the ruins of which ancient canal-building culture?
Hohokam
Hohokam farmers left their canals behind around 1450. Settlers who dug the old ditches out again in the 1860s named the town for the bird reborn from its ashes, though one founder had wanted to call it Stonewall.
Q 07What do forecasters call the towering walls of dust that thunderstorms push across Phoenix in summer?
Haboob
Haboob comes from an Arabic word for a strong wind. A thunderstorm's downdraft hits the desert floor and shoves a wall of dust ahead of it that can stand thousands of feet high and miles long.
Q 08What is the nickname of the Phoenix metropolitan area?
Valley of the Sun
Valley of the Sun began as a sales pitch: local boosters coined it to sell the Salt River Valley's mild winters to tourists, and the slogan stuck to Phoenix and its neighboring cities.
Q 09Which Arizona city was the first in the United States to be named a UNESCO City of Gastronomy, in 2015?
Tucson
Tucson's UNESCO listing leads with its farming roots: the longest agricultural history of any city in the United States, on land cultivated for some 4,000 years.
Q 10Which one-armed major explored the Grand Canyon by boat?
John Wesley Powell
John Wesley Powell lost his right arm at Shiloh and went back to the war as a major. In 1869 he took four boats down a river no one had charted and came out three months later a national hero.
Q 11Theodore Roosevelt made the Grand Canyon a monument in 1908; which president signed the 1919 national park act?
Woodrow Wilson
Woodrow Wilson signed the act on February 26, 1919. The first bill for a Grand Canyon park had failed in Congress back in 1882, so the canyon waited 37 years as a forest reserve and then a monument.
Q 12García López de Cárdenas, the first European known to see the Grand Canyon, was scouting for which conquistador's 1540 expedition?
Coronado
Coronado came north hunting the fabled Seven Cities of Gold and found none, and Spanish officials judged his expedition a failure. One of its side trips still gave Europe its first sight of the canyon.
Q 13What is the highest point in Arizona, at 12,633 feet?
Humphreys Peak
Q 21Old Route 66 ran straight through which Arizona park?
Petrified Forest
Petrified Forest fed and housed Route 66 drivers at its Painted Desert Inn. Interstate 40 later replaced the old highway, whose abandoned roadbed still crosses the park.
Q 22John Ford shot Stagecoach, Fort Apache and The Searchers among the buttes of which Arizona landscape?
Monument Valley
Monument Valley was pitched to Hollywood by its own trading-post owner: during the Depression, Harry Goulding showed the studios what his valley looked like, and John Ford came out to film Stagecoach.
Q 23Which sandstone gorge near Page, with sections called The Crack and The Corkscrew, requires guided tours?
Antelope Canyon
Humphreys Peak is the stump of a far bigger volcano. Much of the mountain is gone, perhaps blasted away as at Mount St. Helens in 1980, perhaps worn down by landslides, water and ice.
Q 14Which tribal land in Arizona changes its clocks for daylight saving time while most of the state stays put?
Navajo Nation
The Navajo Nation reaches into two neighboring states that do change their clocks, so it springs forward with them and keeps one time across all its land.
Q 15From March to November, most of Arizona keeps the same clock time as which state?
California
California springs forward each March onto the hour most of Arizona keeps all year, and the two match until November. Most of Arizona never touches its clocks; it's the Pacific coast that moves.
Q 16Old Oraibi, one of the oldest continuously inhabited US villages, belongs to which people?
Hopi
Hopi families at Old Oraibi split bitterly in 1906 over schooling and other American influences. The losing side left to found a new village, and Oraibi lost much of its population.
Q 17Which state touches Arizona at only a single point, the Four Corners?
Colorado
Colorado sits diagonally across the Four Corners. The 1875 marker may stand as much as 1,800 feet from its intended spot, but an accepted marker is the legal corner, so the states meet exactly there.
Q 18Hoover Dam, on Arizona's western border, holds back which reservoir?
Lake Mead
Lake Mead filled behind a dam Washington spent 14 years declining to call by its name: after Herbert Hoover left office the Interior Department said Boulder Dam, until Congress restored Hoover's name after World War II.
Q 19The 1831 London Bridge, bought in 1968, was rebuilt across a channel of which Arizona reservoir?
Lake Havasu
Lake Havasu had no water under the bridge at first: chainsaw magnate Robert McCulloch rebuilt it stone by numbered stone on dry land, then dredged a channel beneath it.
Q 20NASA trained Apollo astronauts inside which privately owned landmark in northern Arizona?
Meteor Crater
Meteor Crater belongs to the Barringer family. Daniel Barringer spent 27 years hunting beneath it for a giant iron meteorite, until an astronomer's 1929 analysis argued the impact had vaporized it.
Antelope Canyon was carved by flash floods, and they still arrive with little warning: rain falling miles away can funnel through the slot. Every visitor must go in with a guide.
Q 24The vivid blue-green water at Havasu Falls comes from a high concentration of what?
Calcium carbonate
Calcium carbonate dissolved in the creek tints the water and settles out as travertine, building the natural dams behind each pool. The people who live there are named for it: Havasupai means people of the blue-green waters.
Q 25Lowell Observatory, where Clyde Tombaugh made his famous 1930 discovery, is in which Arizona city?
Flagstaff
Flagstaff has guarded the observatory's view ever since: in 1958 it passed the first law of its kind, limiting searchlights, and in 2001 it was named the world's first International Dark Sky City.
Q 26Which world did Arizona adopt as its official state planet in 2024?
Pluto
Pluto was discovered at an Arizona observatory in 1930, and the 2024 law calls it a planet anyway, 18 years after astronomers demoted it to a dwarf planet.
Q 27Which Arizona city refused McDonald's its yellow arches in 1993?
Sedona
Sedona officials feared golden arches would clash with the red rocks, so McDonald's settled on blue-green ones instead, and the odd-colored sign became a tourist stop in its own right.
Q 28Which Route 66 town has a Standin' on the Corner Park thanks to the Eagles' Take It Easy?
Winslow
Winslow lost its traffic when Interstate 40 bypassed it, and downtown withered. In 1999 the town built the park to cash in on the one lyric that had put it on the map.
Q 29Which Arizona mining town, founded by Ed Schieffelin in 1879, is 'The Town Too Tough to Die'?
Tombstone
Tombstone was named for a warning: Army men told Ed Schieffelin the only thing he would find in those hills was his own tombstone, so he gave the name to his first silver claim.
Q 30Which gunfighter joined the Earp brothers at the O.K. Corral?
Doc Holliday
Doc Holliday walked down the street with Virgil, Wyatt and Morgan Earp. The shooting took about 30 seconds and happened in a vacant lot nearby, not in the corral that gave it its name.