50 free Concrete trivia questions with answers — technology quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
This concrete trivia quiz covers the most-manufactured material on Earth, from Nabataean cisterns and the Pantheon's dome to the Three Gorges Dam. The easy questions handle the basics: what concrete is made of, how it hardens, why it needs steel, where the name Portland comes from and which Roman building still holds the dome record. From there it moves through the pioneers Smeaton, Aspdin, Monier, Coignet and Freyssinet, plus clinker, gypsum, fly ash, admixtures and the slump test. The harder half is for engineers and curious builders: Abrams' law, the seawater chemistry of Roman concrete, air entrainment trade-offs, tremies and bagwork, pervious and bacterial concretes, cold-weather placement, the cement industry's CO2 split between fuel and calcination, and the world records for pours and pumping. If you have played our engineering or inventions quizzes, this is the deep dive on one material. Every answer was checked against the encyclopaedia entry for concrete before publishing.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Concrete is the second-most-used substance in the world after what?
Water
It is also the most widely used building material and the most-manufactured material on Earth.
Q 02What are the two basic components of concrete?
Aggregate bound by a cement
Cement-bound concrete differs from asphalt concrete, which uses a bituminous binder.
Q 03What is the chemical process by which cement reacts with water and hardens?
Hydration
The reaction is exothermic, so ambient temperature affects how fast concrete sets.
Q 04How does mortar, used to bond bricks, differ from concrete?
It contains only fine aggregates
Mortar is mainly used as a bonding agent for bricks and tiles; grout also lacks coarse aggregate.
Q 05The word 'concrete' comes from a Latin word meaning what?
Compact or condensed
Concretus is the perfect passive participle of concrescere, 'to grow together'.
Q 06Concrete floors dating to roughly 1400-1200 BC were found in the royal palace of which Greek site?
Tiryns
The Assyrian Jerwan Aqueduct of 688 BC also used waterproof concrete.
Q 07Which desert traders pioneered concrete-like materials and kept their waterproof cisterns secret?
The Nabataeans
They discovered hydraulic lime by 700 BC and built kilns for mortar in southern Syria and Jordan.
Q 08What did the Romans call their concrete?
Opus caementicium
It was made from quicklime, pozzolana and pumice aggregate.
Q 09Which Roman building has the world's largest unreinforced concrete dome?
The Pantheon
The Colosseum was also built largely of concrete.
Q 10What volcanic ingredient gives Roman concrete its remarkable durability and resistance to seawater?
Pozzolana ash
The pyroclastic material reacts with seawater to form Al-tobermorite crystals over time.
Q 11What technique has been proposed as the source of Roman concrete's 'self-healing' ability?
Hot mixing that leaves lime clasts
The lime clasts can dissolve and recrystallise to fill cracks.
Q 12Which Roman treatise, rediscovered by Poggio Bracciolini in 1414, contained a description of Roman cement?
De architectura by Vitruvius
A copy at Charlemagne's scriptorium produced many of the surviving medieval copies.
Q 13Which French waterway linking the Atlantic and the Mediterranean was built using concrete in 1670?
Canal du Midi
Q 21What is the intermediate product of the cement kiln called before it is ground into cement?
Clinker
Producing a ton of it takes 3.3 to 3.6 gigajoules of energy even in efficient kilns.
Q 22What difficult-to-dispose-of waste is the most common alternative fuel for cement kilns?
Used tyres
The kilns' extreme temperatures burn even awkward fuels completely.
Q 23According to Abrams' law, what does a lower water-to-cement ratio produce?
Stronger, more durable concrete
More water gives a freer-flowing mix with a higher slump but less strength.
A 16th-century Venetian dockyard had already used hydraulic lime mortar in its foundations.
Q 14John Smeaton pioneered hydraulic lime in concrete while building a light on which rocks off Devon in the 1750s?
Eddystone
Smeaton's Tower was the third Eddystone Lighthouse.
Q 15Who patented Portland cement in 1824?
Joseph Aspdin
His son William continued developments into the 1840s.
Q 16Why did Aspdin name his cement after Portland?
It resembled the island's famous quarried stone
Portland stone was quarried in Dorset, England.
Q 17Who is credited with inventing reinforced concrete in 1849?
Joseph Monier
He also designed and built the first reinforced concrete bridge in 1875.
Q 18Who built the first reinforced concrete house, in 1853?
François Coignet
He introduced iron reinforcement in the 1850s; steel followed with G. A. Wayss in the 1880s.
Q 19Which French engineer patented prestressed concrete on 2 October 1928?
Eugène Freyssinet
Tendon cables compress the concrete to strengthen it against tension.
Q 20Portland cement is made by heating limestone with clay or shale and grinding the resulting product with what?
Gypsum
The heated product is called clinker; the gypsum is a source of sulfate.
Q 24Fly ash, a common mineral admixture, is a by-product of what?
Coal-fired power plants
Ground blast-furnace slag comes from steelmaking and silica fume from electric arc furnaces.
Q 25Each 1% of entrained air in concrete may reduce its compressive strength by roughly how much?
5%
Air entrainment is nonetheless used because it reduces freeze-thaw damage.
Q 26Why is calcium chloride, an effective accelerator, prohibited in some countries?
It corrodes steel reinforcement
Nitrates are used instead even though they work less well.
Q 27What simple measure of workability is taken by filling and lifting an 'Abrams cone'?
The slump
A dry mix slumps only an inch or two; a wet one may slump eight inches.
Q 28What is asphalt concrete commonly called in the UK and Ireland?
Tarmac
In North America it is blacktop or pavement; the process was refined by Belgian immigrant Edward De Smedt.
Q 29Pervious or 'no-fines' concrete contains what percentage of interconnected air voids?
15 to 25 percent
Rain drains through it to the soil below, recharging aquifers instead of causing runoff.
Q 30Bacteria such as Bacillus pasteurii are added to some concretes to do what?
Precipitate calcium carbonate that heals cracks
Some strains also cut corrosion of rebar by up to four times.