Cancer Awareness Trivia
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99 free Cancer Awareness trivia questions with answers — science & nature quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Cancer is one name for hundreds of diseases, and its story runs from a Roman physician's word for a swelling to a Nobel Prize for teaching the immune system to fight back. Along the way come a surgeon who linked soot to tumours in the 1700s, a wartime poison that became the first chemotherapy, and a marsupial whose cancer spreads by biting. These 99 questions cover the biology of tumours, the landmark discoveries behind screening, vaccines and targeted drugs, the awareness days and ribbon colours that mark the calendar, and the athletes, presidents and performers whose diagnoses changed public understanding. Cervical and ovarian cancer get their own share, from the smear test's inventor to the global elimination targets. Play it to test what you know, or print it for a fundraiser quiz night or a health class.
30 of 99 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which animals carry 20 copies of a tumour-suppressor gene that humans have once, which may help explain Peto's paradox?
Elephants
Elephants' cells self-destruct far more readily than ours when their DNA is damaged, which may be why an animal so huge and long-lived rarely dies of cancer.
Q 02Which Australian marsupial became endangered through a contagious facial cancer passed on by biting?
Tasmanian devil
Tasmanian devil tumour cells pass from animal to animal as living grafts, hiding from the new host's defences so that it rarely rejects them; most devils die within months of the first lumps.
Q 03The first chemotherapy drugs, tested on lymphoma patients at Yale in 1942, came from which First World War weapon?
Mustard gas
Mustard gas left soldiers short of white blood cells, so Yale pharmacologists tried a chemical cousin on a man with advanced lymphoma; his tumours melted away, though only for a few weeks.
Q 04Pierre Curie kept a sample of which element against his arm for ten hours, and the burn suggested a tumour treatment?
Radium
Radium burned Curie's skin so badly that the wound took months to heal, and in 1901 a French dermatologist began treating patients' skin lesions with borrowed radium.
Q 05In 1775 Percivall Pott tied scrotal cancer to soot lodged in the skin of which workers, the first occupational cancer?
Chimney sweeps
Chimney sweeps' apprentices were boys small enough for narrow flues, who often climbed them naked and caked in soot; in 1788 Parliament barred sweeps from taking on any boy under eight.
Q 06Which US official's 1964 report tying smoking to lung cancer came out on a Saturday to spare the stock market?
Surgeon General
Surgeon General Luther Terry chose a Saturday so the news would also fill the Sunday papers; the next year Congress ordered a health warning onto every cigarette pack.
Q 07BCG, the century-old tuberculosis vaccine, is placed directly inside which organ to treat early cancer there?
Bladder
Bladder cancer has been treated this way since the 1970s: the live vaccine is run in through a catheter and held for two hours, rousing defensive cells in the lining that seem to kill cancer cells too.
Q 08Which Breaking Bad character is diagnosed with lung cancer the day after turning 50, setting the plot in motion?
Walter White
Walter White, a chemistry teacher told he has inoperable lung cancer and at best two years to live, starts cooking methamphetamine to leave his family money.
Q 09Whose cervical tumour cells, taken without consent in 1951, became the first immortal human cell line?
Henrietta Lacks
Henrietta Lacks died months after the biopsy, yet her HeLa cells still reproduce indefinitely in labs worldwide, and her family learned of them only in the 1970s.
Q 10Which former US president announced at 90, in August 2015, that melanoma had reached his brain, then lived to 100?
Jimmy Carter
Jimmy Carter was given a new antibody drug approved only the year before, and within four months said a brain scan showed no sign of the tumours; he lived another nine years.
Q 11Steve Jobs refused surgery for nine months after his 2003 diagnosis of a rare tumour in which organ?
Pancreas
Jobs's islet-cell tumour of the pancreas was the rare treatable kind, and his biographer reports he later regretted trying diets and acupuncture first.
Q 12Lance Armstrong, later stripped of seven Tour de France titles, was diagnosed at 25 in October 1996 with which cancer?
Testicular
Armstrong's testicular cancer had already spread when it was found, and after recovering he founded the charity now known as the Livestrong Foundation.
Q 13Terry Fox ran 5,373 km across Canada on an artificial leg in 1980 before cancer stopped him; what was the run called?
Marathon of Hope
Q 21After Chernobyl in 1986, radioactive iodine in milk caused thousands of cancers of which gland in local children?
Thyroid
The thyroid soaks up iodine, and children, with small glands and milk-heavy diets, took the largest doses; more than 6,000 thyroid cancers had been diagnosed among them by 2005.
Q 22Hazel and Augustus, teenagers who fall in love at a cancer support group, lead which 2012 John Green novel?
The Fault in Our Stars
The Fault in Our Stars takes its title from Cassius's line in Julius Caesar, and Green wrote it after working as a student chaplain in a children's hospital.
Q 23Which US president signed the National Cancer Act on 23 December 1971, launching the so-called 'war on cancer'?
Richard Nixon
The Marathon of Hope lasted 143 days and ended when the cancer that had cost Fox a leg spread to his lungs, yet the annual run in his name continues worldwide.
Q 14Under the nail of which toe or finger did Bob Marley's fatal skin cancer, diagnosed in 1977, begin?
Big toe
Big toe: the dark spot was first taken for a football injury, but it was acral lentiginous melanoma, which hides under nails and on soles, and Marley refused to have the toe amputated.
Q 15Which aggressive brain tumour was found in John McCain in July 2017 after surgery to remove a blood clot?
Glioblastoma
Glioblastoma also killed Ted Kennedy in 2009 and Beau Biden in 2015, and McCain returned to the Senate less than two weeks after his brain surgery.
Q 16Which original Saturday Night Live star, Gene Wilder's wife, died of ovarian cancer in 1989 after misdiagnoses?
Gilda Radner
Gilda Radner's widower helped found Gilda's Club, cancer support clubhouses named for her line that the disease gave her 'membership in an elite club I'd rather not belong to'.
Q 17Which Big Brother star's illness and death from cervical cancer in 2009, aged 27, sent young British women rushing for screening?
Jade Goody
Jade Goody was told she had cancer while a contestant on India's version of Big Brother, and the surge in smear tests, dubbed the Jade Goody effect, made ministers review the screening age.
Q 18Which first lady, the first Argentine ever given chemotherapy, died of cervical cancer in 1952 aged 33?
Eva Perón
Eva Perón was told her first operation was for appendicitis and her cancer was kept from her; a Yale neurosurgeon who studied her skull X-rays argues she was also lobotomised, which others dispute.
Q 19Which cancer of the lung lining, caused by asbestos in over 80% of cases, appears about 40 years after exposure?
Mesothelioma
Mesothelioma risk extends to families: washing the clothes of someone who worked with asbestos raises the chance of developing it.
Q 20Which gas, seeping from soil into basements, is the top cause of lung cancer among US non-smokers?
Radon
Radon is radioactive, a step in the slow decay of uranium in rock, and the EPA rates it second only to cigarettes as a cause of lung cancer overall.
Richard Nixon had already announced, two months before signing, that shuttered germ-warfare laboratories at the Army's Fort Detrick would be turned into a cancer research centre.
Q 24Which colour ribbon is the international symbol of childhood cancer awareness?
Gold
Gold was chosen because it is a precious metal, a colour meant to reflect the most precious thing in our lives, and it is worn through September's awareness month.
Q 25Which colour is the official symbol of ovarian cancer awareness, worn on the first Friday of each September?
Teal
Teal campaigns stress symptoms such as persistent bloating because, unlike cervical cancer, ovarian cancer has no reliable test for women who feel well.
Q 26World Cancer Day marks a charter signed in 2000 by UNESCO's chief and the host nation's president in which city?
Paris
Paris hosted the World Summit Against Cancer, where Jacques Chirac and UNESCO's director-general signed a charter whose own text made the signing date, 4 February, World Cancer Day.
Q 27Macmillan Cancer Support's biggest fundraising event asks Britons to host what each September?
A coffee morning
A coffee morning was the simple idea in 1990: guests gave the price of their cup to Macmillan, the charity Douglas Macmillan founded in 1911 after his father died of cancer.
Q 28Which spring flower has the UK charity Marie Curie used in its fundraising appeal every March since 1986?
Daffodil
Daffodils were handed out fresh at the first appeal, held in Scotland; today the Great Daffodil Appeal offers pins instead, and the flower sits in the charity's logo.
Q 29The Pap smear for cervical screening, invented in the 1920s, is named after a physician born in which country?
Greece
Greece-born Georgios Papanikolaou first reported the method in 1928 to little notice, and it caught on only in the 1940s; his wife Mary was his lab technician and one of his test subjects.
Q 30Which cosmetics company handed out pink ribbons at its counters in 1992, helping make them breast cancer's best-known symbol?
Estée Lauder
Estée Lauder's Evelyn Lauder and Self magazine first asked activist Charlotte Haley to share her peach ribbon; she refused them as too commercial, so they switched the colour to pink.