Cardiology
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50 free Cardiology trivia questions with answers — science & nature quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Cardiology is the branch of medicine that looks after the heart and the vessels it feeds, and its history is full of stubborn doctors, risky experiments and happy accidents. Much of what saves lives today started as an idea nobody else believed in. This quiz keeps things friendly. It covers how the heart is built and how it beats, the everyday tests and treatments a heart doctor reaches for, the warning signs worth knowing, and the people whose discoveries changed what a hospital can do. Every answer comes with a short explanation, so a wrong guess still teaches something. It suits students revising the basics, nurses and carers who want a quick refresher, quiz hosts planning a science round, and anyone curious about the muscle that never takes a break.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which Bee Gees disco hit, at about 103 beats per minute, is used to teach the rhythm of CPR chest compressions?
Stayin' Alive
Stayin' Alive sits inside the 100 to 120 compressions a minute that rescuers aim for. The American Heart Association built a public training campaign around it.
Q 02Which well-known pill was first developed by Pfizer as a treatment for chest pain and high blood pressure?
Viagra
Viagra, or sildenafil, did little for heart patients in early trials, but the volunteers reported an unexpected side effect. Pfizer changed course and launched it for erectile dysfunction in 1998.
Q 03Which Swedish industrialist was prescribed nitroglycerin, the explosive behind his fortune, for his heart?
Alfred Nobel
Alfred Nobel wrote to a friend in 1896 that it was an irony of fate to be told to swallow the stuff. In tiny doses the explosive relaxes blood vessels and eases chest pain.
Q 04Which instrument did French doctor René Laennec invent in 1816 by rolling sheets of paper into a tube?
The stethoscope
The stethoscope began as a paper tube because Laennec felt it improper to press his ear to a young woman's chest. The tube carried her heartbeat more clearly than his bare ear ever had.
Q 05In which country did Christiaan Barnard perform the first human-to-human heart transplant in 1967?
South Africa
South Africa made headlines around the world when Barnard gave Louis Washkansky a new heart at Groote Schuur Hospital in Cape Town. Washkansky lived for 18 days.
Q 06Heart surgeons pronounce CABG, short for coronary artery bypass grafting, like the name of which vegetable?
Cabbage
Cabbage is how the letters CABG are spoken in operating theatres. The operation reroutes blood around a blocked heart artery using a vessel borrowed from elsewhere in the body.
Q 07In 2022, surgeons in Maryland gave David Bennett a genetically modified heart from which animal?
A pig
A pig carrying 10 genetic modifications supplied the heart, the first of its kind successfully transplanted into a person. Bennett survived for two months after the operation.
Q 08Which implanted heart device was first fitted in 1958 to Swede Arne Larsson, who went on to receive 26 of them?
A pacemaker
A pacemaker sends small electrical pulses to keep the heartbeat regular. Larsson's first one failed after three hours, yet he lived to 86 and outlived both its inventor and his surgeon.
Q 09A healthy human heart, like the hearts of all mammals and birds, is divided into how many chambers?
Four
Four chambers work as two pumps side by side: the right pair sends blood to the lungs to collect oxygen, and the left pair pushes it out to the rest of the body.
Q 10Which everyday painkiller, sold by Bayer since 1899, is given straight away to people with a suspected heart attack?
Aspirin
Aspirin makes blood platelets less sticky, which slows a growing blockage in a heart artery. In the ISIS-2 trial it cut deaths after a suspected heart attack by about a fifth.
Q 11Which artery, the largest in the human body, carries oxygen-rich blood out of the heart's left side?
The aorta
The aorta leaves the top of the heart, curves over it and runs down to the abdomen, where it splits into two smaller arteries.
Q 12Which chest pain, typically brought on by exertion and eased by a few minutes of rest, warns of narrowed heart arteries?
Angina
Angina strikes when the heart muscle needs more oxygen than its narrowed arteries can deliver. The full Latin name, angina pectoris, translates as a strangling feeling in the chest.
Q 13Which device, kept in public places in boxes marked AED, delivers an electric shock to reset a chaotic heart rhythm?
A defibrillator
Q 21Lipitor, once the world's best-selling medicine, belongs to which class of drugs taken to prevent heart attacks?
Statins
Statins slow the liver's production of blood fats. Lipitor alone brought in more than $125 billion in about 14 years, at times a quarter of Pfizer's revenue.
Q 22In a blood pressure reading such as 120 over 80, what name is given to the first, higher number?
Systolic
Systolic pressure is the peak reached as the heart squeezes blood out. The second figure, the diastolic, is the low point while the heart refills between beats.
Q 23Which procedure, first done on a coronary artery by Andreas Gruentzig in 1977, widens a blockage with a tiny balloon?
Angioplasty
A defibrillator small enough to carry was invented in Belfast by Frank Pantridge. Today's public units read the heart rhythm themselves and decide whether a shock is needed.
Q 14Which painless test uses electrodes stuck to the skin to draw the heart's electrical activity as a line graph?
An ECG
An ECG, short for electrocardiogram, needs only ten sticky electrodes on the limbs and chest, yet it gives doctors twelve different electrical views of the heart.
Q 15Which medical term names long-term high blood pressure, a condition that usually causes no symptoms of its own?
Hypertension
Hypertension rarely announces itself, so many people learn of it only at a routine check. Left untreated for years, it strains the arteries, the heart and the kidneys.
Q 16Which waxy substance travels through the blood in particles nicknamed good HDL and bad LDL, and can clog arteries?
Cholesterol
Cholesterol is not all bad: every animal cell uses it to build its outer membrane, and the body turns it into hormones and vitamin D.
Q 17The word cardiology comes from kardia, meaning heart, and logia, meaning study, in which ancient language?
Greek
Greek supplied the kardia in cardiac and cardiogram, while the Latin word for heart, cor, survives in cordial and courage.
Q 18Which English physician showed in 1628 that the heart pumps blood around the body in one continuous circuit?
William Harvey
William Harvey set out the idea in a 72-page book printed in Frankfurt, home of a book fair that would spread it quickly. Doctors still took about twenty years to accept it.
Q 19Which grim nickname do doctors give a heart attack caused by a blockage in the left anterior descending artery?
The widowmaker
The widowmaker earned its name from its poor outlook: the blocked vessel feeds much of the front wall of the heart, so a large area of muscle is starved at once.
Q 20Which mineral can trigger dangerous heart rhythms if its level in the blood strays too high or too low?
Potassium
Potassium helps reset the electrical charge of heart cells between beats, which is why hospitals check it in routine blood tests. A level far out of range can stop the heart.
Angioplasty needs no open surgery: the balloon rides in on a thin tube threaded through an artery in the wrist or groin. Gruentzig's first patient in Zurich stayed awake throughout.
Q 24For a coronary bypass, surgeons often borrow the great saphenous vein from which part of the patient's body?
The leg
The leg can spare it: the great saphenous is the longest vein in the body, and removing a length does not materially hinder the limb's circulation.
Q 25Which invention, first used successfully by John Gibbon in 1953, takes over a patient's circulation during surgery?
The heart-lung machine
The heart-lung machine pumps and oxygenates blood outside the body, giving surgeons a still, empty heart to work on. Gibbon's first success was an 18-year-old in Philadelphia.
Q 26Which heart valve, the only one with two flaps instead of three, is named after a bishop's headdress?
Mitral
Mitral comes from mitre, the two-peaked hat of a bishop, which the valve's pair of flaps resembles. It guards the doorway between the two left-hand chambers of the heart.
Q 27Which cluster of cells that sets the heartbeat was discovered by student Martin Flack in the heart of a mole?
The sinoatrial node
The sinoatrial node fires on its own, and each spark spreads across the heart as one beat. Flack made the find while his mentor, Arthur Keith, was out on a bicycle ride.
Q 28Which term, built on a word for rapid, describes an adult's resting heart rate above 100 beats per minute?
Tachycardia
Tachycardia is normal during exercise or a fright and matters when the heart races at rest. The opposite, a resting rate under 60, is common in well-trained athletes.
Q 29Which irregular heart rhythm, the most common serious one, makes the upper chambers quiver and can cause a stroke?
Atrial fibrillation
Atrial fibrillation can be so quiet that some people learn they have it only after a stroke. Blood-thinning drugs are often prescribed to cut that risk.
Q 30Which protein, released into the blood by damaged heart muscle, do hospitals measure to confirm a heart attack?
Troponin
Troponin belongs inside muscle cells, so finding heart troponin loose in the blood means those cells have been injured. Levels can stay raised for up to two weeks.