Dams Trivia
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48 free Dams trivia questions with answers — technology quiz, new questions added Sep 2026.
Dams are among the biggest things humans have ever built, and this quiz covers them from the 3000 BCE Jawa Dam in Jordan to the 2020s. You will sort gravity dams from arch, buttress and embankment dams, place the tallest dam on Earth (a 305-metre arch in Sichuan) and the largest reservoir by surface area (Lake Volta), and meet the engineers, presidents and folk singers tangled up with Grand Coulee, Aswan, Itaipu, Kariba and Akosombo. The second half is about what happens when dams go wrong: the South Fork Dam and the Johnstown Flood, William Mulholland's St. Francis Dam, the Vajont landslide, the 1975 Banqiao collapse, the Teton Dam, Malpasset, the 2017 Oroville spillway evacuation, and the RAF's bouncing-bomb raid on the Möhne and Eder. Along the way: the beaver dam visible from space, the Bond stunt at the Contra Dam, Life magazine's first cover, and the Elwha and Klamath removals. Hoover Dam and the Three Gorges Dam each have their own quiz on BrainPickle, so they only get a passing mention here. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's articles on the individual dams and the sentence that supports it is attached to each question.
30 of 48 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which type of dam relies on its own sheer weight to hold back the water?
Gravity dam
Gravity dam: it is proportioned so that its own weight alone resists the water's push to slide it or tip it over, which is why these dams are such broad, heavy blocks of concrete or masonry.
Q 02An arch dam is curved in which direction?
Upstream, into the reservoir
Upstream, into the reservoir: the water presses on the outside of the curve and squeezes the arch into the gorge walls, keeping its joints closed, so a thin shell can do the work of a massive block.
Q 03Under what name was Hoover Dam commonly known from 1933 until Congress settled the matter in 1947?
Boulder Dam
Boulder Dam: after Hoover left office the Interior Department avoided his name, allegedly because the new Secretary disliked him, until a 1947 resolution signed by Truman restored it.
Q 04The Sadd el-Kafara, the oldest large dam known, was built around 2600 BCE by which civilisation?
The ancient Egyptians
The ancient Egyptians: they raised the 14-metre embankment across a ravine to hold back rare, violent floods, and one of those floods is thought to have destroyed it.
Q 05The 305 m concrete arch that became the world's tallest dam in the 2010s stands in which country?
China
China: Jinping-I spans the Yalong River in Sichuan, and the filling of its reservoir from 2012 was blamed by some for setting off hundreds of minor earthquakes nearby.
Q 06Nurek Dam, the world's tallest when finished in 1980, is in which former Soviet republic?
Tajikistan
Completed in 1980 on the Vakhsh River, it held the overall height record until Jinping-I overtook it in 2013.
Q 07The 285-metre Grande Dixence Dam, once the tallest in the world, stands in which country?
Switzerland
Switzerland: the lake behind the wall fills each summer with meltwater from the glaciers of the Alps around it.
Q 08Lake Volta, one of the world's largest man-made lakes, lies entirely in which country?
Ghana
Ghana: the lake covers about 3.6 percent of the country, and filling it behind the Akosombo Dam in the 1960s drowned hundreds of villages and displaced about 80,000 people.
Q 09Which Zambezi reservoir is the world's largest man-made body of water by volume?
Lake Kariba
Lake Kariba: it holds about 180 cubic kilometres, and as it filled a rescue known as Operation Noah moved thousands of stranded animals to safety.
Q 10The Itaipu Dam on the Paraná River is a joint project of which two countries?
Brazil and Paraguay
Brazil and Paraguay: the neighbours' grids run at different frequencies, so ten of the twenty generators turn out 50 Hz power for Paraguay and the other ten 60 Hz for Brazil.
Q 11The reservoir of the Itaipu Dam drowned which waterfall, perhaps the greatest on Earth by volume of water?
Guaíra Falls
Guaíra Falls: the roar of its cataracts carried for some 30 kilometres, until the rising reservoir swallowed them in 1982.
Q 12Grand Coulee Dam, the largest hydroelectric station in the United States, is in which state?
Washington
Washington: designed to water the desert, the dam spent the Second World War feeding the Northwest's aircraft factories and shipyards, plus a secret plutonium works.
Q 13Which folk singer wrote 26 songs in a month in 1941, including 'Roll On, Columbia', while promoting the Columbia dams?
Woody Guthrie
Q 21In 2017, damaged spillways at which California dam forced more than 180,000 people to flee?
Oroville Dam
Oroville Dam: the 770-foot earth wall on the Feather River was never itself at risk, but its emergency spillway came close to caving in, which officials feared would send a wall of water downstream.
Q 22Glen Canyon Dam forms which reservoir, named for the Civil War veteran who led an 1869 boat expedition through the Grand Canyon?
Lake Powell
Lake Powell: John Wesley Powell had lost an arm at Shiloh, yet in 1869 he led four small boats down the Green and Colorado rivers and came out of the Grand Canyon some three months later.
Q 23Margaret Bourke-White's photo of Montana's Fort Peck Dam was the first cover of which magazine, in 1936?
Life
Woody Guthrie: the Bonneville Power Administration hired him for a month to sell the public on its dams, and 'Roll On, Columbia', set to the tune of 'Goodnight, Irene', was later adopted as an official state folk song.
Q 14The Aswan High Dam, built between 1960 and 1970, was developed with the help of which country?
The Soviet Union
The Soviet Union: after the United States and Britain pulled their funding offer in 1956, Nasser seized the Suez Canal to pay for the dam, and Moscow stepped in with the loans.
Q 15Which was the most famous of the monuments moved clear of the rising Lake Nasser under UNESCO?
The Abu Simbel temples
The Abu Simbel temples: between 1963 and 1968 Ramesses II's rock-cut temples were cut apart and rebuilt, block by block, on a man-made hill more than 60 metres above the old site.
Q 16The Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam, Africa's largest hydroelectric plant, sits on which river?
The Blue Nile
The Blue Nile: Ethiopians helped pay for the $5 billion dam by buying bonds and sending gifts, while Egypt downstream opposed it from the 2011 start to the 2025 opening.
Q 17Which dynasty built the Kallanai on the Kaveri River some 2,000 years ago, a stone dam still in use?
The Chola
The Chola: King Karikala's stone dam still diverts the Kaveri across its delta, the rice bowl of Tamil Nadu, and the British engineers of the 1800s added regulators to it.
Q 18The great dam of Marib, which watered the capital of the ancient kingdom of Sheba, is in which modern country?
Yemen
Yemen: the dam kept the desert around Marib green for more than a thousand years, and a bursting of it is recalled in the Quran as a punishment on the Sabaeans.
Q 19The tallest dam the Romans ever built, at Subiaco near Rome, held a pleasure lake for which emperor's villa?
Nero
Nero: his roughly 40-metre masonry wall was the highest dam the Romans ever raised, and it stood for more than twelve centuries before giving way in 1305.
Q 20Jawaharlal Nehru called which Indian dam a 'New Temple of Resurgent India'?
Bhakra Dam
Bhakra Dam: speaking at the site on the Sutlej, Nehru cast India's new dams and power plants as the temples of a modern nation, and he came back in 1963 to dedicate the finished wall.
Life: its editors had sent her for construction pictures, and wrote that they were surprised when she also brought back a human document of frontier life in the towns around the dam.
Q 24Tarbela, a giant dam born of a 1960 water-sharing treaty between India and Pakistan, holds back which river?
The Indus
The Indus: the treaty handed India the three eastern rivers of the basin, so Pakistan built Tarbela to catch the summer floods of its main river and release them through the dry months.
Q 25A researcher found the world's longest beaver dam in 2007 while browsing which online service?
Google Earth
Google Earth: Jean Thie spotted the dam on satellite views of Wood Buffalo National Park, far from any road or trail, and park rangers later confirmed it from a helicopter.
Q 26Water pours down the 'Glory Hole' at California's Monticello Dam only when what happens?
The lake overfills
The lake overfills: once Lake Berryessa rises past the funnel's rim, water drops straight down it and out through a pipe below the dam, which in 2017 happened for the first time in over a decade.
Q 27A stuntman's bungee jump off the towering Contra Dam in the Alps opens which James Bond film?
GoldenEye
GoldenEye: Wayne Michaels made the drop of more than 700 feet for real, then a record for a bungee jump from a fixed structure, and a 2002 poll of film fans voted it the best movie stunt ever.
Q 28Operation Chastise, the 1943 'Dambusters' raid, breached which two German dams?
Möhne and Eder
Möhne and Eder: the Sorpe was hit but held. The raid cost 53 of its 133 airmen, and more than half of the people drowned in the floods were foreign prisoners and forced labourers held in camps below the dams.
Q 29Who designed the bouncing bomb used against the German dams in 1943?
Barnes Wallis
Barnes Wallis: his bomb skipped across the reservoir like a skimming stone, clearing the torpedo nets strung in front of the wall, then sank against it before exploding.
Q 30The failure of the South Fork Dam on 31 May 1889 caused which American disaster?
The Johnstown Flood
The Johnstown Flood: the dam's owners, a private club of Pittsburgh industrialists, had lowered its crest for a carriage road and screened the spillway to keep their game fish in, and the screens clogged with debris.