Autism
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50 free Autism trivia questions with answers — science & nature quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Autism shapes how a person communicates, senses the world and focuses attention, and no two autistic people are alike. Public understanding has changed a great deal within a single lifetime, from the first clinical descriptions to today's emphasis on listening to autistic people directly. This quiz gathers fun facts about autism in plain language: where the word comes from, who first wrote about it, which old theories turned out to be wrong, and what everyday terms used by the autistic community mean. It also covers the artists, athletes, scientists, performers and fictional characters who have made autism more visible on screen, on stage and in sport. It is written for families, students, teachers and anyone marking an awareness day, and many of the questions suit kids. Every answer comes with a short explanation, so a wrong guess still teaches something.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Julia, a four-year-old puppet with autism and a toy rabbit named Fluffster, joined which children's TV show in 2017?
Sesame Street
Sesame Street gave the part to puppeteer Stacey Gordon, whose own son is on the autism spectrum, so that Julia would feel true to life.
Q 02Dustin Hoffman won an Oscar as Raymond Babbitt, an autistic savant who counts cards in Las Vegas, in which film?
Rain Man
Rain Man was the highest-grossing film of 1988, and Hoffman spent a year meeting autistic people to prepare for the role.
Q 03Claire Danes won an Emmy playing which autistic professor, famous for redesigning how cattle are handled?
Temple Grandin
Temple Grandin built herself a squeeze machine, or hug box, at 18 and has been a professor of animal science at Colorado State University since 1990.
Q 04Greta Thunberg has described her Asperger's diagnosis with which word, usually heard in comic-book films?
A superpower
A superpower is how Thunberg describes it, while also saying that Asperger's limited her before she began her school strike at 15.
Q 05Autcraft, a server founded by a Canadian father in 2013 as a safe haven for autistic children, runs on which video game?
Minecraft
Minecraft was a favourite of many autistic children who met bullying on public servers, so web developer Stuart Duncan built them a moderated world of their own.
Q 06Autistic British artist Stephen Wiltshire draws entire cities from memory after a single short ride in what?
A helicopter
A helicopter flight of just twenty minutes over New York was enough for Wiltshire to draw a nineteen-foot panorama of the city.
Q 07In the Netflix series Atypical, autistic teenager Sam Gardner is fascinated by Antarctica and which animals?
Penguins
Penguins calm Sam so much that he recites the four Antarctic species aloud whenever he feels overwhelmed.
Q 08Elon Musk told viewers he has Asperger's while hosting which long-running American comedy show in 2021?
Saturday Night Live
Saturday Night Live gave Musk the stage for the announcement, and a year later he said social cues were not intuitive to him growing up.
Q 09The word autism, coined by Swiss psychiatrist Eugen Bleuler, comes from a Greek word meaning what?
Self
Self is the meaning of the Greek autos, and Bleuler first used his new word for the inward withdrawal he saw in patients with schizophrenia.
Q 10In the Korean drama Extraordinary Attorney Woo, autistic lawyer Woo Young-woo compares her cases to which animals?
Whales
Whales are her special interest, and the rookie attorney's habit of explaining life through them often baffles colleagues at her Seoul law firm.
Q 11Freddie Highmore plays Shaun Murphy, a young autistic surgeon with savant syndrome, in which American medical drama?
The Good Doctor
The Good Doctor is a remake of a 2013 South Korean series of the same name, and it ran on ABC for seven seasons.
Q 12Who wrote The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, a mystery narrated by teenage maths whiz Christopher Boone?
Mark Haddon
Mark Haddon has said the 2003 novel is less about Asperger's than about difference, being an outsider and seeing the world in a surprising way.
Q 13Autistic savant Daniel Tammet, who recited 22,514 digits of pi, says he learned which language in a single week?
Icelandic
Q 21Asperger syndrome stopped being a separate diagnosis in 2013 with the publication of which American psychiatric manual?
DSM-5
DSM-5 folded Asperger syndrome, classic autism and a catch-all category called PDD-NOS into one diagnosis, autism spectrum disorder.
Q 22Donald Triplett, the first person ever diagnosed with autism, lived and died in the town of Forest in which US state?
Mississippi
Mississippi was home to Triplett, labelled Case 1 in 1943, who went on to work as a banker and lived to the age of 89.
Q 23Which term describes repeating words or phrases just heard from someone else, a trait seen in many autistic children?
Echolalia
Echolalia joins the Greek words for echo and speech, and the repetition may come at once or be delayed until long after the words were heard.
Icelandic was the challenge, and after a week of study Tammet gave an interview in the language on the television programme Kastljós.
Q 14Blind autistic musician Derek Paravicini can replay almost any tune after one hearing on which instrument?
Piano
Piano came early for Paravicini, who was born at 25 weeks and began playing at the age of two when his nanny gave him an old keyboard.
Q 15Which American child psychiatrist described eleven children in a landmark 1943 paper that first defined autism?
Leo Kanner
Leo Kanner also set up the first child psychiatry clinic in the United States, and he named the condition in his paper early infantile autism.
Q 16Hans Asperger, whose name was long attached to a form of autism, studied and worked in which European capital?
Vienna
Vienna's university children's clinic was where Asperger worked when he published his 1944 paper, which went largely unnoticed in the English-speaking world until the 1980s.
Q 17Which British medical journal retracted, in 2010, a fraudulent 1998 paper linking the MMR vaccine to autism?
The Lancet
The Lancet withdrew the paper after reporter Brian Deer exposed it, and its lead author, Andrew Wakefield, was struck off the UK medical register.
Q 18Studies of which group of children, begun in 1977, showed that autism is largely inherited?
Twins
Twins who are identical share all their DNA, so comparing them with fraternal pairs let researchers estimate how much of autism comes down to genes.
Q 19A discredited 1950s theory blamed autism on unloving mothers, comparing them to which household appliances?
Refrigerators
Refrigerators lent their name to the refrigerator mother theory, also called Bettelheim's theory, which wrongly blamed autism on a lack of maternal warmth.
Q 20Hand-flapping, rocking and finger-snapping are examples of which repetitive behaviour common in autistic people?
Stimming
Stimming is thought to help people calm themselves and shut out sensory overload, which is one reason it is so hard to suppress.
Q 24Grunya Sukhareva described autistic traits in the 1920s, long before Western researchers, in which Soviet city?
Moscow
Moscow was where Sukhareva founded a sanatorium school for children and wrote up her cases almost two decades before the famous Western papers.
Q 25Which British psychiatrist coined the term Asperger's syndrome and helped found the National Autistic Society?
Lorna Wing
Lorna Wing turned to autism research after realising her own daughter Susie was autistic, and her work showed that autism forms a spectrum.
Q 26Which actress, who played a mermaid in the 1984 film Splash, was diagnosed with autism as a child?
Daryl Hannah
Daryl Hannah was nearly institutionalised on medical advice, but her mother instead took her to Jamaica for a change of scene.
Q 27Clay Marzo, an athlete with Asperger's featured in the film Just Add Water, is a professional in which sport?
Surfing
Surfing made Marzo a teenage star: at 15 he became the first to score two perfect 10s in National Scholastic Surfing Association history.
Q 28Which Springwatch presenter explored his own diagnosis in the 2017 BBC documentary Asperger's and Me?
Chris Packham
Chris Packham was diagnosed in 2005, in his forties, and the film went on to win a Broadcasting Press Guild Award for best single documentary.
Q 29Bella Ramsey was diagnosed as autistic while filming the first season of which drama opposite Pedro Pascal?
The Last of Us
The Last of Us star Ramsey has said they would not be an actor without autism, crediting a sharp eye for micro-expressions and social cues.
Q 30Bruno the Brake Car, an autistic character living on the North Western Railway, belongs to which children's franchise?
Thomas & Friends
Thomas & Friends cast a ten-year-old autistic actor from Toronto, Chuck Smith, to voice Bruno for North American audiences.