Getting your questions ready
Getting your questions ready
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50 free Blood Donation trivia questions with answers — science & nature quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
Giving blood is one of the few medical procedures most healthy adults can take part in, yet most donors know little about what happens after the bag is sealed. Components are split, chilled, frozen or kept warm and rocking, tested against a short list of infections, and used within days, weeks or months depending on what they are. These 50 questions cover the whole journey: eligibility and the gap between donations, what a unit is used for, plasma and platelet collection by apheresis, World Blood Donor Day, the wartime and Red Cross origins of the donor service and the blood bank, storage limits, screening tests and the donor policies that have changed in recent years. A few reach into the record-setting donors and the experiments of the 1600s and 1900s. Most are pitched for a general audience, with a handful for people who work in transfusion or simply collect medical history. Play on your phone with instant answers and explanations, or print it for a classroom, a donor-drive quiz night or a health-awareness event.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Charles Drew, who led the 1940 Blood for Britain plasma drive, quit the American Red Cross over which practice?
Segregating donations by race
Segregating donations by race had no scientific basis, Drew argued, yet the Red Cross kept the policy until 1950. He had been appointed director of its first blood bank in February 1941.
Q 02Donated platelets sit at room temperature under constant agitation, which limits their shelf life to about how long?
Five days
Five days is typical because warm storage lets any bacteria that slipped in multiply, so platelets sit at 20–24 °C and are tested for contamination before use.
Q 03Why does blood donation use a large 16- or 17-gauge needle rather than a finer one?
To avoid shearing red cells
A wide bore is used to avoid shearing red cells, which the forces inside a narrow needle can physically damage as the blood flows through.
Q 04According to the American Red Cross, someone in the United States needs blood roughly how often?
Every two seconds
Every two seconds for blood and every thirty seconds for platelets, says the Red Cross, and demand for a given type is never steady, so a bank can be full of one group and short of another.
Q 05From 1988 to 2013, what did US blood banks see during every national disaster, such as the September 11 attacks?
A surplus of donations
A surplus of donations of more than 100 units followed each disaster, because people give most in a crisis, when the blood is arguably least needed. First-week donations after 9/11 reached about 49,000.
Q 06In which country do blood donors get the day of their donation as a paid holiday from work?
Italy
Italy grants donors a paid day off, one of many non-cash incentives alongside the T-shirts, first-aid kits and priority-in-shortage promises that blood centres hand out elsewhere.
Q 07Members of which religion may refuse transfusions, giving bloodless surgery and blood substitutes special importance?
Jehovah's Witnesses
Jehovah's Witnesses hold that blood is sacred, and an oxygen-carrying substitute would also sidestep disease transmission and the chronic donor shortage.
Q 08Why are directed donations from family and friends not safer for the recipient, despite a common belief?
Donors may hide risk factors
Donors may hide risk factors when pressured to give for a loved one, so directed units can carry a higher, not lower, risk of bloodborne infection.
Q 09In 1997 the World Health Organization set a goal that every blood donation should come from which kind of donor?
Unpaid volunteers
Unpaid volunteers were the standard in only 49 of 124 countries surveyed by 2006, and most plasma donors in the United States are still paid for each visit.
Q 10Unlike red cells or platelets, frozen plasma is typically given an expiry date of how long after donation?
One year
One year is the usual expiry for frozen plasma, which is why keeping up a plasma supply is far less of a problem than maintaining stocks of the cellular components.
Q 11Which anticoagulant did Albert Hustin and Luis Agote separately use in 1914 for the first indirect blood transfusions?
Sodium citrate
Sodium citrate strips calcium ions out of blood so it cannot clot, and Richard Lewisohn fixed its safe concentration at 0.2% the following year, letting donor and patient be far apart.
Q 12During which conflict did Frederic Durán-Jordà's Barcelona transfusion service register almost 30,000 donors?
Spanish Civil War
The Spanish Civil War service processed 9,000 litres of blood in 30 months, and Durán-Jordà fled to Britain in 1938 to help build London's network of blood banks.
Q 13What is the minimum weight the American Red Cross sets for a whole-blood or platelet donor?
110 pounds
Q 21Which American doctor set up the first blood banks on the Western Front in 1917, using soldiers as donors?
Oswald Hope Robertson
Oswald Hope Robertson had learned blood matching and preservation under Peyton Rous, and stocked bottles of blood at Casualty Clearing Stations ahead of the Third Battle of Ypres.
Q 22In 1916 Peyton Rous and Joseph Turner found that adding which sugar to treated blood kept red cells usable for weeks?
Glucose
Glucose, as a dextrose solution, kept the cells intact for about four weeks in the Rous–Turner mixture, the discovery that paved the way for blood preservation and the blood bank.
Q 23Carl Walter and W. P. Murphy Jr. replaced the breakable glass bottle for blood collection in 1950 with what?
110 pounds (50 kg) is the floor, rising to 130 pounds for men and 150 pounds for women who give 'power red' double units of red cells by apheresis.
Q 14Along with hepatitis B, hepatitis C and HIV, which infection rounds out the WHO's four core tests for donated blood?
Syphilis
Syphilis serology is the fourth basic test, yet in 2006 the WHO reported that 56 of 124 countries surveyed did not run the four on every donation.
Q 15Donated plasma is normally yellow; which pigment, also behind jaundice, is a main reason for the colour?
Bilirubin
Bilirubin, carotenoids, haemoglobin and transferrin tint plasma yellow, while a green shade can point to ceruloplasmin and a brown one to broken red cells.
Q 16In May 2023 the US FDA replaced its deferral for men who have sex with men with donor questions focused on what?
Individual sexual behaviour
Individual sexual behaviour, not orientation or gender, now drives the US screen, which began as a lifetime ban the FDA imposed in 1983.
Q 17Canadian Blood Services, set up in 1998, runs the blood supply in every province and territory except which one?
Quebec
Quebec runs its own operator, Héma-Québec, which supplies the province's patients and also manages its stem cell donor registry.
Q 18Which supplement cuts the number of donors turned away for low red-cell counts, but often upsets the stomach?
Iron
Iron-supplemented donors keep higher haemoglobin and iron stores, but the pills frequently cause diarrhoea, constipation and abdominal discomfort.
Q 19World Blood Donor Day, organised by the WHO with Red Cross and transfusion bodies, was first held in which year?
2004
2004 saw the first event, staged by the WHO, the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, the IFBDO and the ISBT to thank donors and promote safe blood.
Q 20Which British Red Cross worker ran the world's first blood donor service from his London home, starting in 1921?
Percy Lane Oliver
Percy Lane Oliver's panel grew from 20 colleagues to about 2,700 donors by 1938, and London Rover Scouts were enlisted as demand rose; English Heritage put a plaque on the house in 1979.
A plastic bag
A plastic bag made it safe and easy to split a single unit of whole blood into several components, which reshaped what one donation could supply.
Q 24The 1940 Blood for Britain project collected plasma for shipment across the Atlantic from hospitals where?
New York City
New York City hospitals took donations from almost 15,000 people over five months, yielding more than 5,500 vials of plasma for British soldiers and civilians.
Q 25Richard Titmuss's 1970 book comparing Britain's voluntary and America's commercial blood systems had what title?
The Gift Relationship
The Gift Relationship came down in favour of the British model, and the sociologist's book is still cited in debates about turning blood into a commodity.
Q 26Which country collects whole-blood donations in units of just 200 or 400 millilitres, among the smallest anywhere?
Japan
Japan's 200 mL option sits far below the 460–500 mL drawn in the United States, while India takes 350 mL and Singapore 350 or 450 mL.
Q 27Plasma donors in the United States may give twice a week, so could nominally donate roughly how much in a year?
About 83 litres
About 83 litres, or 22 gallons, is possible under US rules, whereas a donor limited to every other week, as in some countries, could give only about 16 litres.
Q 28To count as fresh frozen plasma in the United States, plasma must be frozen solid within how long of collection?
Eight hours
Eight hours is the US cut-off, at −18 °C or colder; plasma frozen within 24 hours is a separate product, PF24, with similar uses.
Q 29Which blood product, rich in fibrinogen and factor VIII, did Judith Graham Pool devise at Stanford in 1964?
Cryoprecipitate
Cryoprecipitate is made by slowly thawing frozen plasma to 1-6 C, and US regulators did not approve it until 1971, seven years after Pool's method.
Q 30Which colleague of Karl Landsteiner co-discovered the Rh factor and went on to devise the rival Rh–Hr naming system?
Alexander Wiener
Alexander Wiener's Rh–Hr nomenclature competes with the Fisher–Race CDE system, and his once-doubted idea that one gene could carry several specificities later proved correct.