Data Science
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50 free Data Science trivia questions with answers — science & nature quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Data science sits where statistics, computing and curiosity meet, and its history is stranger than its reputation suggests. Breweries, wartime aircraft, shipwrecks, election forecasts and a child's toy all played a part in how people learned to pull answers out of numbers. This quiz mixes those stories with the working knowledge of the field: the averages and distributions every analyst leans on, the ideas behind modern predictive models, the well-known datasets beginners cut their teeth on, and the people and companies that built the tools. It suits students revising for an exam, analysts warming up for an interview, and anyone who enjoys a good fact about numbers. Every answer comes with a short explanation, so a wrong guess still teaches something.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01The Student's t-test, a staple of data analysis, was devised to monitor beer quality at which brewery?
Guinness
Guinness preferred its staff to publish under pen names, so William Sealy Gosset signed his 1908 paper as Student. His test was built for judging barley and stout from very small samples.
Q 02Which famous Victorian drew rose-shaped polar area diagrams of soldiers' deaths in a Crimean War hospital?
Florence Nightingale
Florence Nightingale's charts made a grim point: ten times more soldiers died of disease than of battle wounds. She went on to become the first female member of the Royal Statistical Society.
Q 03Hadoop, the big-data framework, was named by creator Doug Cutting after his young son's toy of which animal?
Elephant
Elephant it was: Doug Cutting was working at Yahoo when he borrowed the toy's name. The software had begun life inside Nutch, an open-source web search project.
Q 04Scientists renamed 27 human genes by 2020 because which software kept turning symbols such as MARCH1 into dates?
Excel
Excel read MARCH1 as 1-Mar and SEPT2 as 2-Sep, a problem geneticists first reported in 2004. The naming committee finally changed MARCH1 to MARCHF1 and SEPT1 to SEPTIN1.
Q 05Kaggle's 'start here' contest for machine learning beginners asks who survived which maritime disaster?
Titanic
Titanic passenger records are the raw material. The challenge, subtitled Machine Learning from Disaster, is pitched as a first project for getting familiar with the basics.
Q 06Which company's $1 million data science contest ended in 2009 when a team beat the in-house rating predictions by 10%?
Netflix
Netflix paid out to a team called BellKor's Pragmatic Chaos, which bettered the company's own Cinematch system by 10.06%. The open contest had been running since 2006.
Q 07British mathematician Clive Humby, who helped launch Tesco's Clubcard, said in 2006 that data is the new what?
Oil
Oil was the comparison, and it was soon stretched further: like crude, raw data is valuable but cannot really be used until it has been refined.
Q 08Physician John Snow's 1854 dot map of a London neighbourhood traced which deadly disease to a single water pump?
Cholera
Cholera cases clustered around the Broad Street pump in Soho, and Snow's evidence persuaded the local council to remove its handle. He is counted among the founders of modern epidemiology.
Q 09A famous 2013 word-vector result found that 'king' minus 'man' plus 'woman' lands closest to which word?
Queen
Queen came out nearest, which meant a model fed only raw text had picked up the male/female relationship by itself, as a consistent offset between word vectors.
Q 10Michael Lewis's book Moneyball follows which baseball team's use of statistics to compete on a small budget?
Oakland Athletics
Oakland Athletics general manager Billy Beane leaned on sabermetrics to build his roster. His 2002 team spent $44 million on salaries and still competed with the $125 million Yankees.
Q 11Tyler Vigen's Spurious Correlations website famously charted divorce rates against consumption of which spread?
Margarine
Margarine consumption and divorce tracked each other closely for almost ten years in his graph. Vigen, then a law student, wrote a program to mine datasets for such coincidences.
Q 12Arthur Samuel, who coined the term machine learning in 1959, wrote a famous self-learning program for which game?
Checkers
Checkers was the testbed for one of the world's first successful self-learning programs. Samuel first got it running on one of the earliest commercial computers.
Q 13Nate Silver named his polling site FiveThirtyEight after the total number of what in American politics?
Electoral College votes
Q 21Which average is favoured for incomes because a few huge salaries barely move it?
Median
Median income is the usual yardstick because increases in the largest incomes alone have no effect on it, whereas they drag the mean upward.
Q 22Which statistical term for data points far from the rest also titles Malcolm Gladwell's 2008 book on success?
Outliers
Outliers examines what lies behind unusually high levels of success. It popularised the 10,000-hour rule, though the authors of the original study dispute Gladwell's use of it.
Q 23Which machine learning problem arises when a model memorises its training data and then stumbles on unseen data?
Overfitting
Overfitting is what happens when a model treats noise as if it were real structure. Give it as many parameters as observations and it can predict its training data perfectly by memorising it.
Electoral College votes total 538. Silver launched the site in March 2008, and his model went on to call 49 of the 50 states correctly in that year's presidential election.
Q 14Charles Minard's celebrated 1869 flow map shows which commander's army shrinking on the march to Moscow and back?
Napoleon
Napoleon's troop numbers form a band that narrows across the page, set against distance, direction and temperature. It has been described as possibly the best statistical graphic ever drawn.
Q 15Google launched a service in 2008 that tried to track outbreaks of which illness from people's search queries?
Influenza
Influenza proved harder to track than hoped: the service consistently overestimated cases from 2011 to 2013, once predicting twice the doctors' visits the CDC recorded. It stopped publishing estimates in 2015.
Q 16Ronald Fisher's 1936 dataset, a classic first exercise in machine learning, measures petals and sepals of which flower?
Iris
Iris flowers of three species were measured by botanist Edgar Anderson, who gathered two of the species from a single pasture on Canada's Gaspé Peninsula on the same day.
Q 17Which publication declared data scientist 'the sexiest job of the 21st century' in a much-quoted 2012 article?
Harvard Business Review
Harvard Business Review ran the piece in its October 2012 issue. Co-author DJ Patil went on to serve as the first Chief Data Scientist of the United States, from 2015 to 2017.
Q 18Which 18th-century English minister is the namesake of the theorem for updating a probability as new evidence arrives?
Thomas Bayes
Thomas Bayes never published his most famous idea. His notes were edited by Richard Price and printed only after his death.
Q 19The bell-shaped normal distribution is also named after which German mathematician, who computed the orbit of Ceres?
Gauss
Gauss gives the bell curve its other name, the Gaussian distribution, though some authors credit its discovery to Abraham de Moivre, who published an early form decades before him.
Q 20Abraham Wald's wartime study of damage on bombers is the textbook example of which statistical trap?
Survivorship bias
Survivorship bias is the error of judging only from what made it through. Wald's memos estimated how vulnerable each part of an aircraft was from the damage seen on planes that returned.
Q 24Which kind of experiment did Google first run in 2000 to settle how many search results to show?
A/B testing
A/B testing splits users by chance between variant A and variant B to see which does better. Google went on to test dozens of hyperlink hues to find the colour that drew the most clicks.
Q 25In the computing maxim GIGO, a warning that flawed input data gives flawed results, both Gs stand for which word?
Garbage
Garbage in, garbage out reached a wide public through a 1957 newspaper article about US Army mathematicians and their work with early computers.
Q 26Drew Conway's much-shared picture of data science sets hacking skills, statistics and subject expertise in which form?
Venn diagram
Venn diagram circles place data science where all three skills meet. Conway marked the overlap of hacking skills and subject expertise, with no statistics, as the danger zone.
Q 27Which Greek letter stands for standard deviation and names the quality programme Motorola introduced in 1986?
Sigma
Sigma, written σ, is the usual symbol. Motorola's Six Sigma scheme refers to the share of a normal curve lying within six standard deviations of the mean, used to represent a defect rate.
Q 28Which British political consultancy closed in 2018 after harvesting data from millions of Facebook profiles?
Cambridge Analytica
Cambridge Analytica got hold of details from up to 87 million profiles through a third-party app. The scandal put Mark Zuckerberg in front of the US Congress in April 2018.
Q 29Herman Hollerith's tabulating machines sped up the 1890 US census by reading data stored on what?
Punched cards
Punched cards were Hollerith's answer to an 1880 count that had taken about eight years to process. His concept went on to dominate data processing for nearly a century.
Q 30Which branch of AI earned three of its pioneers the 2018 Turing Award?
Deep learning
Deep learning takes its name from the layers its data passes through, which can number from three to several thousand. The field draws its inspiration from biological neuroscience.