Fahrenheit Trivia
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43 free Fahrenheit trivia questions with answers — science & nature quiz, new questions added Sep 2026.
This Fahrenheit trivia quiz covers the temperature scale that most of the world abandoned and the United States never did. It starts with Daniel Gabriel Fahrenheit himself, the Danzig-born instrument maker orphaned by poisonous mushrooms who built the first reliable mercury thermometer, borrowed Ole Romer's scale, and set his zero with a brine of ice and ammonium chloride. From there it asks how the scale was redefined so water freezes at exactly 32 and boils at 212, why body temperature became 98.6, where Fahrenheit and Celsius meet, what absolute zero is in degrees F, how the Rankine scale relates, which countries still forecast in Fahrenheit, and why British tabloids use it for heatwaves. The last section covers the name's afterlife: Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451, Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11, the Quantic Dream game and the Dior cologne. Every answer is checked against Wikipedia's articles on the scale, its inventor and related topics, and each explanation adds one further fact. Good for science classes, metric-versus-imperial arguments and pub quizzes.
30 of 43 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01In US forecasts given in Fahrenheit, the heat index combines air temperature with which other reading?
Relative humidity
Relative humidity: the index assumes shade and light wind, so standing in full sunshine can raise it by up to 15 F.
Q 02At what temperature does water freeze on the Fahrenheit scale?
32 F
32 F: water freezes into ice about 9 percent less dense than the liquid, which is why ice floats.
Q 03At what temperature does water boil on the Fahrenheit scale at sea level?
212 F
212 F: when the scale was later redefined on water's freezing and boiling points, normal body temperature came to be quoted as about 98.6 instead of 96.
Q 04Before 1948, what name was widely used for the temperature scale now called Celsius?
Centigrade
Centigrade: a 1948 international conference renamed it, partly because in French 'centigrade' also meant a hundredth of a unit of angle.
Q 05What fixed the zero point of Fahrenheit's original scale?
A brine of ice, water and ammonium chloride
A brine of ice, water and ammonium chloride: he developed the scale after visiting the Danish astronomer Ole Romer in Copenhagen in 1708.
Q 06Fahrenheit 451's author insisted it was less about state censorship than about the harm done by what?
Television
Television: in the novel, Captain Beatty explains that censorship began with people abandoning books, not with a government order.
Q 07In Fahrenheit 451, what are the 'seashells' that Montag's wife wears?
Tiny in-ear radios
Tiny in-ear radios: foreshadowing today's earbuds, they wall her off emotionally from her husband.
Q 08At the end of Fahrenheit 451, how do the exiled 'book people' keep banned books alive?
By memorising them
By memorising them: Montag has something to offer them because he can recall parts of the Book of Ecclesiastes.
Q 09At what temperature do the Fahrenheit and Celsius scales read the same number?
-40
-40: each Celsius degree spans 1.8 Fahrenheit degrees, so the Fahrenheit number drops faster as it gets colder until the two readings meet.
Q 10Fahrenheit 451's author typed its first version on rented typewriters in which Los Angeles university's library?
UCLA
UCLA: when his publisher asked him to double the story into a novel, he went back to the same basement typing room.
Q 11Early in Fahrenheit 451, what does Montag come home to find his wife has overdosed on?
Sleeping pills
Sleeping pills: technicians pump her stomach and replace her blood, yet the next morning she remembers nothing of it.
Q 12In Fahrenheit 451, how does Guy Montag kill Captain Beatty?
With a flamethrower
With a flamethrower: Beatty had taunted Montag and threatened to track down his secret ally, Faber.
Q 13Anders Celsius, who proposed his temperature scale in 1742, came from which country?
Sweden
Sweden: in 1736 he joined the French expedition to Lapland whose measurements showed Earth is flattened at the poles, as Newton predicted.
Q 21In Fahrenheit 451, who betrays Guy Montag by reporting that he hides books?
His wife, Mildred
His wife, Mildred: she turns him in after he frightens her friends by reading them poetry.
Q 22In which city was Daniel Gabriel Fahrenheit born in 1686?
Danzig (Gdansk)
Danzig (Gdansk): after his parents died there in 1701, his guardians sent him away to learn bookkeeping and train as a merchant.
Q 23How did Fahrenheit's parents die in 1701, leaving him an orphan at 15?
Eating poisonous mushrooms
His guardians packed him off to a merchant apprenticeship in Amsterdam; when he ran away, a warrant was issued to press him into the Dutch East India Company.
Q 14How was Celsius's 1742 scale unlike today's?
It ran the other way, with water boiling at 0
It ran the other way, with water boiling at 0: within a few years others, including the botanist Carl Linnaeus, flipped it to today's form.
Q 15Which media giant blocked its own film label from releasing Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11?
Disney
Disney: the label's bosses, Harvey and Bob Weinstein, bought the film back themselves and found other distributors.
Q 16Which British Overseas Territory uses Fahrenheit for everyday temperatures?
The Cayman Islands
The Cayman Islands: it kept Fahrenheit for everyday use even though Britain itself began pushing metric units in the 1960s.
Q 17In Fahrenheit 451, what was Montag's secret ally Faber in his former career?
An English professor
An English professor: he regrets that he did nothing to defend books when he saw them being banned.
Q 18Besides Donald Trump, which city's water crisis does Michael Moore's documentary Fahrenheit 11/9 examine?
Flint
Flint: in 2014 a state-appointed emergency manager switched the city's water to the Flint River, and lead leached from ageing pipes.
Q 19In Canada, which kitchen appliance is commonly set in Fahrenheit rather than Celsius?
Ovens
Ovens: Canada moved its weather reports to Celsius in the 1970s, but Fahrenheit stayed on virtually all its ovens.
Q 20Henry Cavendish, who led the Royal Society committee that fixed the Fahrenheit scale's boiling point, discovered which gas?
Hydrogen
Hydrogen: he called it 'inflammable air' and showed that burning it with oxygen produces water.
Q 24Fahrenheit is credited with producing the first successful thermometers filled with which liquid?
Mercury
Mercury: his thermometers beat the alcohol ones of the day, yet many places, including US states, have since banned mercury fever thermometers as toxic.
Q 25In which city did Fahrenheit spend his later life, selling barometers and thermometers?
Amsterdam
Amsterdam: he had first gone there as a teenage merchant's apprentice, but ran away in 1707.
Q 26While developing his temperature scale, what did Fahrenheit find water could do below its freezing point?
Stay liquid
Stay liquid: such 'supercooled' droplets in clouds freeze on contact, which is how ice can build up on aircraft wings.
Q 27Ole Romer, whose thermometer scale inspired Fahrenheit's, showed in 1676 that light does what?
Travels at a finite speed
Travels at a finite speed: timings of eclipses of Jupiter's moons drifted by minutes as Earth's distance from Jupiter changed.
Q 28Daniel Fahrenheit died in 1736 in which Dutch city, where he had gone to seek a patent?
The Hague
The Hague: he died nearly destitute and was given a fourth-class funeral in the city's Kloosterkerk.
Q 29Which place holds the official record for Earth's hottest air temperature, 134 F, set in 1913?
Death Valley, California
Death Valley, California: its narrow basin lies below sea level, and rising hot air is trapped by steep mountain walls and recycled back down.
Q 30Average human body temperature, long quoted as 98.6 F, has done what since the 1800s?
Fallen
Fallen: men born in the 1990s average about 1.06 F cooler than men born in the early 1800s, likely because of less chronic inflammation.