Compass Trivia
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50 free Compass trivia questions with answers — technology quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
This compass trivia quiz covers the humble direction-finder from Han dynasty divination spoons to the gyrocompasses in submarines. The easy questions handle which direction is 90 degrees, the four ordinal points, where the needle actually points and which layer of the Earth makes the field. From there it moves into the history: the mineral behind lodestone, the south-pointing fish, the English monk who first described the compass in Europe, the Amalfi pilot credited with the compass card and the physician who called the Earth a magnet. The harder end is for navigators, sailors and pub-quiz specialists: the difference between variation and deviation, why there are two iron balls on a binnacle, what 'north-east by east' means, the 6,400 mils of a military compass, the five balancing zones, the year the Royal Navy finally accepted liquid compasses and how fast the magnetic pole is racing towards Siberia. Every answer was checked against encyclopaedia entries on the compass, its history, magnetic declination, the compass rose and the scientists and inventors involved, and the supporting sentence is stored with each question. If you enjoy this one, our inventions, exploration and maps quizzes are natural next stops.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01When a phone's compass seems off, Google Maps asks you to move the phone in what shape?
Figure 8
A figure 8 recalibrates the phone's compass: Maps suggests it when your blue dot's beam is wide or points the wrong way, and you repeat it until the beam narrows.
Q 02The luopan is a Chinese magnetic compass used in which traditional practice?
Feng shui
Feng shui practitioners use the luopan to find the precise direction of a building, and China first used magnetic compasses for such spiritual purposes rather than for travel.
Q 03Lodestone, used in the earliest Chinese compasses, is a natural form of which mineral?
Magnetite
Magnetite is the mineral, and pieces of its naturally magnetised form, lodestone, hung so they could turn, served as the first magnetic compasses.
Q 04What is the leading theory for how lodestones become magnetised in nature?
Lightning strikes
Lightning strikes are the leading explanation: the intense, brief magnetic field around a bolt can magnetise surface ore near the strike, whereas Earth's field, about half a gauss, is far too weak on its own.
Q 05What did the name 'lodestone' literally mean when it was coined?
Leading stone
Leading stone is the sense: 'lode' meant a way or course, and the stone got its name from its use by sailors to find their way.
Q 06An early Chinese lodestone direction-finder was shaped like what, resting on a smooth bronze plate?
A spoon
A spoon of lodestone would settle pointing south: early Chinese compasses were read as 'south pointers', unlike today's north-seeking needles.
Q 07An 11th-century Chinese military manual describes a direction-finder shaped like what, floating in water?
A fish
A fish cut from thin iron was heated red-hot and quenched with its tail pointing north, which magnetised it so that its head pointed south when floated.
Q 08Shen Kuo's Dream Pool Essays said a magnetised needle is best hung from a single fibre of what?
Silk
Silk, a single fibre fixed to the needle's centre with a dab of wax, held it, and Shen Kuo noted that some needles pointed south and others north.
Q 09Zhu Yu's Pingzhou Table Talks says Guangzhou ship pilots relied on the south-pointing needle in which conditions?
In dark weather
In dark weather they turned to the needle, since they steered by the sun by day, and they also hauled up samples of seabed mud to judge where they were.
Q 10Europe's earliest known account of the mariner's compass came from Alexander Neckam, who later became what?
An abbot
An abbot, of Cirencester from 1213; around 1190 he wrote that sailors touched a needle to the lodestone and it whirled until its point faced north.
Q 11Besides describing compasses, Petrus Peregrinus's 1269 letter on magnets claimed they could produce what?
Perpetual motion
Perpetual motion was the promise: he drew a toothed wheel that a lodestone would keep turning forever by alternately pulling and pushing its teeth.
Q 12Tradition credits Flavio Gioja, a pilot from which Italian port, with perfecting the mariner's compass?
Amalfi
Amalfi is the town, though Gioja himself may never have existed; the real advance, a needle fixed to a compass card, probably did come from there soon after 1300.
Q 13Around 1290, Yemen's sultan al-Ashraf wrote how to use a magnetic compass to find what?
Mecca's direction
Q 21Ancient and medieval writers claimed which food could rob a lodestone of its power to attract iron?
Garlic
Garlic was blamed from ancient times, and the belief was copied for centuries until experiments published around 1600 showed garlic does not stop a lodestone attracting iron.
Q 22What is the fixed mark on a ship's compass bowl that shows the heading against the card?
Lubber line
Lubber line takes its name from 'lubber', an old sailors' word for a clumsy novice at sea, as in landlubber.
Q 23Chart lines joining places where compasses point equally far off true north are called what?
Isogonic
Isogonic lines appeared on one of the first magnetic charts, drawn after a navy ship sailed the Atlantic measuring how far compass needles pointed off north.
Mecca's direction, the qibla Muslims face in prayer, was his aim, and his treatise is the earliest known evidence of a compass being used to find it.
Q 14Which English physician's 1600 book De Magnete argued that the Earth itself is a giant magnet?
William Gilbert
William Gilbert showed that Earth's own magnetism turns the needle, overturning older ideas that the Pole Star or a magnetic island drew it.
Q 15What name did De Magnete give the lodestone ball it used in its compass-needle experiments?
Terrella
Terrella, 'little earth', was its name: a needle carried over the ball behaved as a compass does across the globe, persuading the author that Earth is one giant magnet.
Q 16In 1692, Edmond Halley explained why compass readings slowly shift by proposing the Earth was what?
Hollow inside
Hollow inside was his answer: nested shells, each magnetised and turning at its own rate, would make compass readings drift over the years.
Q 17In the 1860s, the first practical liquid-filled ship's compasses redesigned the card to do what?
Take weight off the pivot
Take weight off the pivot: a float on the card carried most of it, easing the wear that had made liquid compasses hard to repair, and Edward Samuel Ritchie's floating-card design became a US Navy standard.
Q 18Why did Britain's navy give up Lord Kelvin's dry-card compass for liquid-filled ones in the early 1900s?
Shock and vibration
Shock and vibration easily upset a light dry card while liquid damped its swings, and as warships and their guns grew bigger the liquid design won out.
Q 19The angle between the direction a compass needle points and true north at a given place is called what?
Declination
Declination, which sailors call variation, changes from place to place, and a walker who ignores it can end up kilometres off course.
Q 20On a ship, compass errors caused by iron and steel in the vessel's own structure are known as what?
Deviation
Deviation became a serious problem once ships were built of iron and steel instead of wood, and any error left after adjustment is logged on a correction card.
Q 24Reciting every compass point in order is called doing what to the compass?
Boxing
Boxing the compass meant reciting all 32 points in order and then backwards, and the phrase later came to mean a complete reversal of opinion.
Q 25Where is a ship reported 'two points off the starboard bow'?
Front right
Front right: starboard is the right side, and its old partner larboard gave way to port because the two words sounded confusingly alike.
Q 26Every half hour of a watch at sea, a peg went into a compass-marked traverse board to record what?
The heading sailed
The heading sailed was pegged every half hour, letting the navigator work out the courses the ship had run by the end of the watch.
Q 27The four ordinal or intercardinal directions are which?
NE, SE, SW and NW
NE, SE, SW and NW sit halfway between the cardinal points, but Chinese names them the other way round, so north-east is literally 'east-north'.
Q 28Which symbol, still common today, marked north on compass cards from around 1500?
The fleur-de-lis
The fleur-de-lis is still the usual north mark, though some early makers fixed the needle slightly off it to suit home waters, which misled sailors farther away.
Q 29On old compass roses, which direction was often marked with a Christian cross?
East
East got the cross because, seen from Europe and the Mediterranean, it pointed towards Jerusalem and the Holy Land.
Q 30On old Mediterranean compass roses, the eight main points were named after what?
Winds
Winds gave the points their names, so north was marked with a T for Tramontana, the north wind.