5th and 6th Grade Trivia
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168 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 168 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which is the largest and deepest of Earth's oceans?
Pacific
The Pacific is both the largest ocean and the deepest: its Challenger Deep in the Mariana Trench reaches about 10,900 metres, deeper than Everest is tall.
Q 02Which river carries more water than any other on Earth?
The Amazon
The Amazon discharges about 200,000 cubic metres of water per second into the Atlantic, roughly a fifth of all river water entering the world's oceans, far more than the Nile or Mississippi.
Q 03The Nile River flows north and empties into which sea?
The Mediterranean
The Nile empties into the Mediterranean through the Nile Delta north of Cairo; at roughly 6,650 km it is usually ranked the world's longest river, fed by the White Nile and Blue Nile.
Q 04The Sahara is the largest hot desert, but which two deserts are bigger overall?
Antarctica and the Arctic
Antarctica and the Arctic are polar deserts: a desert is defined by scant precipitation, not heat, and at roughly 14 million square km each they outsize the 9 million square km Sahara.
Q 05Mount Everest sits on the border between Nepal and which other country?
China
Everest straddles the Nepal–China border, with its north face in Tibet; Nepal and China jointly resurveyed the summit in 2020 and announced a single agreed height.
Q 06Which of these numbers is a prime number?
23
23 is prime; 21 is 3 x 7, 25 is 5 x 5 and 27 is 3 x 9. Every whole number greater than 1 is either prime or a product of primes.
Q 07A right angle measures exactly how many degrees?
90
A right angle is 90 degrees, exactly a quarter of the 360-degree full turn; the corner of a square is the classic example.
Q 08Pi, about 3.14159, is what you get when you divide a circle's circumference by what?
Its diameter
Its diameter is the divisor, so every circle is a little over three diameters around; pi's decimals never end or repeat, and Pi Day, March 14, is also Einstein's birthday.
Q 09In the fraction 3/4, what is the number 4 called?
The denominator
The bottom number 4 is the denominator, telling how many equal parts make a whole; the top number 3 is the numerator, counting how many parts are taken.
Q 10What do we call the total distance around the outside of a shape?
Perimeter
Perimeter is the distance around a shape, found by adding up its side lengths; 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
Carbon dioxide enters through pores in the leaves, and photosynthesis uses light energy to combine it with water into glucose, the sugar the plant lives on.
Q 12Which part of a cell is nicknamed the 'powerhouse' because it turns food into a fuel molecule called ATP?
The mitochondrion
The mitochondrion has its own DNA, inherited only from your mother, because it began as a free-living bacterium that cells swallowed around two billion years ago.
Q 13Who discovered cells in 1665 and named them after the small rooms in a monastery?
Robert Hooke
Q 21What are the large moving pieces of Earth's rigid outer shell called?
Tectonic plates
Tectonic plates are rigid slabs of crust and upper mantle that glide over hotter rock beneath; there are seven or eight major ones, moving a few centimetres a year.
Q 22Where are most of Earth's volcanoes actually found?
Underwater
Most volcanoes are underwater: they cluster where plates pull apart or collide, and the longest such boundary, the mid-ocean ridge system, runs along the sea floor.
Q 23Which organ makes up most of the digestive tract's job of absorbing nutrients into the body?
The small intestine
The small intestine absorbs about 90% of nutrients through millions of finger-like villi, which give its roughly six-metre length an enormous surface area.
Robert Hooke coined the word in his 1665 book Micrographia after seeing a thin slice of cork under an early microscope; its tiny boxes reminded him of monks' cells.
Q 14How many bones does an adult human have once childhood bones have fused?
206
206 in an adult, over half of them in the hands and feet; bones make up about 14% of your body weight and are heaviest between ages 25 and 30.
Q 15Which of these is one of the six classical simple machines?
The pulley
The pulley is one of the six classical simple machines, alongside 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
The fulcrum is the pivot point a lever turns on; 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
Mercury is the smallest planet and the nearest to the Sun; its solar day, sunrise to sunrise, lasts about 176 Earth days, twice as long as its 88-day year.
Q 18Jupiter's Great Red Spot is what kind of feature?
A giant storm
The Great Red Spot is a giant anticyclonic storm wider than Earth, with winds above 400 km/h; 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
Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars are the terrestrial planets: small worlds of rock and metal with solid surfaces, unlike the four outer giants made mostly of gas and ice.
Q 24The Declaration of Independence was adopted by the Second Continental Congress on which date?
July 4, 1776
Congress adopted the Declaration on July 4, 1776, two days after voting for independence on July 2, the date John Adams expected Americans to celebrate.
Q 25Who wrote the original draft of the Declaration of Independence?
Thomas Jefferson
Thomas Jefferson wrote the draft in June 1776 as one of the Committee of Five with John Adams and Benjamin Franklin; Congress then cut about a quarter of his text.
Q 26About how many chests of tea were thrown into the harbour at the 1773 Boston Tea Party?
342
Colonists dumped 342 chests of East India Company tea into Boston Harbor on 16 December 1773 in protest at the Tea Act; Parliament answered with the Coercive Acts in 1774.
Q 27Which 1783 agreement ended the American Revolutionary War with Britain recognising US independence?
Treaty of Paris
The Treaty of Paris, signed on 3 September 1783, ended the war; the last major battle had been at Yorktown in 1781, where the French fleet blocked Cornwallis's escape.
Q 28The US Constitution was written at a convention held in 1787 in which city?
Philadelphia
Delegates met in Philadelphia's Independence Hall from May to September 1787, the same building where the Declaration of Independence had been signed eleven years earlier.
Q 29The Bill of Rights, covering free speech, guns, trials and more, is the name for which amendments to the US Constitution?
The first ten
The first ten amendments were ratified together in 1791; 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
France sold it: Napoleon, needing money for war with Britain, let the territory go for $15 million, roughly $18 a square mile.