Elementary School Math Trivia
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100 free Elementary School Math trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Elementary school math is the math everyone was taught and most adults half remember: which shape has how many sides, what the bottom number of a fraction is called, how many feet make a mile, and why the answer to a times-table question once embarrassed a British finance minister on live television. These 100 questions follow what children learn between grade 1 and grade 5 (years 2 to 6 in the UK): shapes and angles, place value, fractions, times tables and division, measuring length, weight and temperature, telling the time, counting coins, simple word problems, and the names of the symbols and words that mathematics runs on. A few famous numbers and where they came from are mixed in, so the round is never just sums. Every answer carries a one-line explanation with the working shown or the fact behind it. Play it with an eight-year-old to see who wins, use it as a quiz-bowl practice round for an elementary or primary class, or print it for a family quiz night.
30 of 100 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which symbol did Welshman Robert Recorde invent in 1557 to avoid 'the tedious repetition' of a three-word phrase?
Equals sign
The equals sign replaced the words 'is equal to', which Recorde was tired of writing out, and he chose two lines 'because no two things can be more equal'.
Q 02Which number name was coined, mathematician Edward Kasner said, by his nine-year-old nephew?
Googol
Googol, a 1 followed by a hundred zeros, was the boy's suggestion, and a respelling of it later gave the search engine Google its name.
Q 03What is 7 times 8?
56
56: a classroom trick is to count 5, 6, 7, 8, because the digits of the answer and the two numbers multiplied line up as 56 = 7 × 8.
Q 04How many squares does a standard chessboard have, laid out as eight rows of eight with the colours alternating?
64
64: in a famous legend a grain of wheat is doubled on every square, and the heap that results comes to more than 18 quintillion grains.
Q 05What shape is a standard red stop sign?
Octagon
Octagon: the shape was settled in the 1920s but the colour was not, and American stop signs stayed yellow until the 1950s.
Q 06How many loaves make a baker's dozen?
13
13: the extra loaf is said to have been insurance, because medieval English bakers who sold short weight could be fined or flogged.
Q 07What do the three inside angles of any triangle on flat paper add up to, the same as a straight line?
180°
180° holds only on a flat surface: a triangle drawn on a globe from the North Pole down to two points on the equator can have three right angles.
Q 08Which date is Pi Day, chosen because of the way the United States writes the month before the day?
March 14
March 14 is 3/14, pi's first three digits: physicist Larry Shaw started the party at San Francisco's Exploratorium in 1988, on what is also Albert Einstein's birthday.
Q 09Which shape do honeybees give the wax cells of a honeycomb, the most economical way to divide a flat surface?
Hexagon
Hexagon: people had guessed since antiquity that no pattern walls off equal cells with less material, but it took until 1999 for Thomas Hales to prove it.
Q 10Which name, from a Latin word meaning 'namer', does the bottom number of a fraction go by?
Denominator
The denominator 'names' the kind of part, such as halves, thirds or quarters, while the top number, the numerator, from the Latin for 'counter', counts how many of them there are.
Q 11Which number does the Roman numeral L stand for, the letter that sits between X and C in value?
50
50: a smaller numeral written before a larger one is subtracted, which is why 40 is XL, ten short of fifty, and 90 is XC.
Q 12How many items are in a gross, the old trade count that means a dozen dozens?
144
144 is 12 × 12; the word comes from the Old French grosse douzaine, a 'large dozen', and a dozen gross makes a great gross of 1,728.
Q 13How many years is 'four score and seven', the span Abraham Lincoln counted back to 1776 at Gettysburg?
87
87: a score is 20, and Lincoln, speaking in November 1863, was counting back to the Declaration of Independence, perhaps echoing the 'threescore years and ten' of Psalm 90.
Q 21Which graph, first published by William Playfair in 1801, shows how a whole splits into parts?
Pie chart
Pie chart: Florence Nightingale later reworked the idea into her 'coxcomb' diagrams, which showed that far more soldiers in the Crimea were dying of disease than of wounds.
Q 22Which Chinese puzzle cuts a square into five triangles, a square and a parallelogram to rearrange into pictures?
Tangram
Tangram pieces are called tans, yet the name is a Western coinage of uncertain origin; in Chinese the puzzle is simply the 'seven boards of skill'.
Q 23Which word, one that also means 'blunt', describes an angle between a right angle and a straight line in size?
Obtuse
Obtuse comes from the Latin for 'blunted', which is also why a person who is slow to take a hint gets called obtuse.
Q 14Which US coin is the smallest and thinnest in circulation, despite being worth more than a penny or a nickel?
Dime
The dime is 17.91 mm across and 1.35 mm thick, smaller than a penny worth a tenth as much, and its name comes from the Old French disme, a 'tenth part'.
Q 15Which name, from the Greek for a sharpened stick, does the ÷ division sign go by?
Obelus
The obelus was first printed as a division sign by Swiss mathematician Johann Rahn in 1659; ancient scholars had used the same mark to flag suspect passages in manuscripts.
Q 16When 47 balloons are shared equally among 6 children, how many balloons are left over?
5
5 are left over: each child gets 7 balloons, which uses up 42, and the 5 that cannot be shared out fairly are what mathematicians call the remainder.
Q 17Which clear plastic half-circle, marked in degrees along its curved edge, do pupils use to measure angles?
Protractor
A protractor usually carries two scales running in opposite directions, so that an angle can be read off whether it opens to the left or to the right.
Q 18How many full weeks are in a year, leaving one spare day, or two in a leap year?
52
52 weeks and one day make a year, which is why a date's day of the week moves on by one each year, or by two once a leap day has passed.
Q 19At how many degrees Fahrenheit does water freeze, on the scale used in United States weather forecasts?
32 °F
32 °F is 0 on the Celsius scale; the two scales disagree at every temperature but one, 40 below zero, where they read exactly the same.
Q 20Which drawing of overlapping circles, named after a Victorian English logician, shows what two groups have in common?
Venn diagram
Venn diagram: John Venn was handy with machines too, and in 1909 his cricket-bowling contraption clean bowled one of Australia's star batsmen.
Q 24Which triangle, named from Greek words for 'equal' and 'leg', has exactly two sides of the same length?
Isosceles
Isosceles triangles also have two equal angles, a proof so early in Euclid that it was nicknamed the 'bridge of asses', perhaps because weaker students could not get across it.
Q 25Which solid shape has every point of its surface the same distance from its centre?
Sphere
A sphere wraps a given volume in the smallest possible surface, which is why a soap bubble settles into one; the name comes from the Greek sphaira, 'ball'.
Q 26Which family name covers squares, rectangles, kites and trapeziums alike?
Quadrilateral
Quadrilateral is built from the Latin for four and side, which makes it an oddity: pentagons, decagons and most other many-sided shapes take their names from Greek.
Q 27Which word describes the total every time two odd numbers are added, as in 3 + 5 or 7 + 9?
Even
Even is the only possibility, because each odd number is an even one plus 1 and the two spare 1s pair up; odd times odd, by contrast, stays odd.
Q 28Which bead-and-rod counting frame is taught in Japan as a way to speed up mental arithmetic?
Abacus
Abacus did not always mean beads: when the word entered English it meant a sand table, a board dusted with sand on which sums could be traced and wiped away.
Q 29Which kind of number word, such as 'third' or 'tenth', tells you position in a line rather than how many?
Ordinal
Ordinal numbers rank where cardinal ones count, and English has an impostor among them: 'second' was borrowed from French and Latin to replace the native word 'other'.
Q 30How many degrees are in a right angle, the corner carpenters check with the 3-4-5 rule?
90°
90° is the angle a triangle with sides of 3, 4 and 5 units always contains, so a builder with a tape measure can square a corner with no other tool.