170 free 5th and 6th Grade trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
67 free 5th grade trivia questions with answers, plus trivia questions for sixth graders and tweens, built around what 10- to 12-year-olds are actually studying. The questions cover world geography (the biggest ocean, the longest river, why Antarctica counts as a desert, the largest country), science (photosynthesis, the powerhouse of the cell, tectonic plates, the planets, the four states of matter, what is in the air), math (primes, pi, right angles, fractions, perimeter, PEMDAS), and US history from the Boston Tea Party and the Bill of Rights to the Louisiana Purchase, Lincoln, Hawaii's statehood and Dr. King. There is a grammar and figurative-language round (verbs, adjectives, similes, alliteration, onomatopoeia, haiku), a bit of ancient history, a famous-scientists round (Einstein, Marie Curie, Amelia Earhart), and a books round on Percy Jackson, Wonder, Harry Potter, Holes, Hatchet, Number the Stars, Romeo and Juliet and Diary of a Wimpy Kid. It works for a classroom warm-up, a family game night, trivia for tweens at a sleepover, or an are-you-smarter-than-a-5th-grader challenge where the grown-ups find out how much they have forgotten. Every answer has been checked against a reference source, shown under each question once you answer, so teachers can trust it.
30 of 170 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which is the largest and deepest of Earth's oceans?
Pacific
Its deepest spot, the Challenger Deep in the Mariana Trench, goes down 10,928 metres, deeper than Everest is tall.
Q 02Which river carries more water than any other on Earth?
The Amazon
Whether it or the Nile is the longest is still argued about, but on volume of water it wins easily.
Q 03The Nile River flows north and empties into which sea?
The Mediterranean
At about 7,088 km it is usually counted as the world's longest river, fed by the White Nile and the Blue Nile.
Q 04The Sahara is the largest hot desert, but which two deserts are bigger overall?
Antarctica and the Arctic
A desert is defined by how little precipitation falls, not by heat, so the frozen poles count.
Q 05Mount Everest sits on the border between Nepal and which other country?
China
A 2020 survey by the two countries put its height at 8,848.86 metres.
Q 06Which of these numbers is a prime number?
23
A prime is a number greater than 1 that cannot be made by multiplying two smaller whole numbers; 21 is 3 x 7, 25 is 5 x 5 and 27 is 3 x 9.
Q 07A right angle measures exactly how many degrees?
90
It is a quarter of a full turn, and the corner of a square is the classic example.
Q 08Pi (about 3.14159) is the ratio of a circle's circumference to what?
Its diameter
Its decimals never end and never repeat, which is what makes it an irrational number.
Q 09In the fraction 3/4, what is the number 4 called?
The denominator
The word fraction comes from the Latin fractus, meaning 'broken'.
Q 10What do we call the total distance around the outside of a shape?
Perimeter
For a circle, the same measurement gets a special name: the circumference.
Q 11Plants make their own food using sunlight, water and which gas from the air?
Carbon dioxide
The process, photosynthesis, gives off oxygen as a by-product, which is the air we breathe.
Q 12Which part of a cell is nicknamed the 'powerhouse' because it makes energy?
The mitochondrion
It was first spotted in 1857 in the muscles of insects, and it makes a fuel molecule called ATP.
Q 13Who discovered cells in 1665 and named them after the small rooms in a monastery?
Robert Hooke
He was looking at a thin slice of cork under an early microscope.
Q 21Earth's outer shell is broken into large moving pieces. What are they called?
Tectonic plates
There are seven or eight major ones, and they have been drifting for three to four billion years.
Q 22Where are most of Earth's volcanoes actually found?
Underwater
They cluster where crustal plates pull apart or crash together, and most of those boundaries are on the ocean floor.
Q 23Which organ makes up most of the digestive tract's job of absorbing nutrients into the body?
The small intestine
Digestion begins before you even take a bite, when the sight and smell of food triggers your stomach glands.
Q 14A baby is born with about 270 bones. Roughly how many does an adult have after some fuse together?
206
Bones make up about 14% of your body weight and are at their heaviest between ages 25 and 30.
Q 15Which of these is one of the six classical simple machines?
The pulley
The others are the lever, wheel and axle, inclined plane, wedge and screw; a bicycle combines several of them.
Q 16The fixed point that a lever pivots on is called what?
The fulcrum
Archimedes supposedly said that with a long enough lever and a place to stand, he could move the world.
Q 17Which is the smallest planet in the Solar System and the closest to the Sun?
Mercury
A single day there, sunrise to sunrise, lasts about 176 Earth days, twice as long as its year.
Q 18Jupiter's Great Red Spot is what kind of feature?
A giant storm
It has been observed since 1831, and Jupiter itself has 2.5 times the mass of all the other planets combined.
Q 19Which planet was found by mathematics before anyone saw it, from its tug on Uranus's orbit?
Neptune
It is the eighth and farthest planet and cannot be seen without a telescope.
Q 20Which four planets are the rocky 'terrestrial' planets of the inner Solar System?
Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars
Only Earth and Mars orbit inside the Sun's habitable zone, where liquid water could exist on the surface.
Q 24The Declaration of Independence was adopted by the Second Continental Congress on which date?
July 4, 1776
Thomas Jefferson wrote the first draft after John Adams talked the Committee of Five into giving him the job.
Q 25Who wrote the original draft of the Declaration of Independence?
Thomas Jefferson
He was one of a five-man committee; Congress then edited his draft.
Q 26About how many chests of tea were thrown into the harbour at the 1773 Boston Tea Party?
342
They were protesting the Tea Act, and Britain called it treason; the Battles of Lexington and Concord followed less than two years later.
Q 27Which 1783 agreement ended the American Revolutionary War with Britain recognising US independence?
Treaty of Paris
The last big battle had been at Yorktown in 1781, where the French navy blocked Cornwallis's escape.
Q 28The US Constitution was written at a convention held in 1787 in which city?
Philadelphia
It is the oldest written national constitution still in force anywhere in the world.
Q 29The Bill of Rights is the name for how many amendments to the US Constitution?
The first ten
James Madison drafted them to answer Anti-Federalists who worried the new government had too much power.
Q 30In 1803 the United States bought the huge Louisiana Territory from which country?
France
Napoleon sold it for $15 million, roughly $18 a square mile.