Granite Trivia
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50 free Granite trivia questions with answers — nature quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
This granite trivia quiz is about the most famous rock on Earth: the coarse-grained igneous stone that makes up the deep basement of every continent and rises to the surface as domes, tors and sheer big walls. The first part covers the geology, from the minerals in the mix (quartz, feldspar and mica), the Latin word behind the name and the way granite cools slowly underground in plutons and batholiths, to weathering, radon, the difference between granite and rhyolite, and why 'black granite' usually is not granite at all. The second part travels to the landmarks and industries built on it: Mount Rushmore, Half Dome and El Capitan, Stone Mountain, Sugarloaf, Pikes Peak, the Cairngorms and Aberdeen's Granite City; Egypt's Aswan quarries and Cleopatra's Needle, the world's first all-granite temple in India, Barre and Quincy in New England, America's first railroad and the Scottish island that supplies most of the world's curling stones. Easy questions suit students and casual players; the hard ones will test geologists and stonemasons. Every answer is checked against Wikipedia's articles on granite and each landmark, and every explanation adds one extra fact. Play, share your score and see who really knows their rocks.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Granite underlies much of the continents, but which rock underlies most of the ocean floor?
Basalt
Basalt: it erupts as lava along the mid-ocean ridges, where new sea floor is made, and it is denser than the granite of the continents.
Q 02The word 'granite' shares its Latin root with the name of which fruit?
Pomegranate
Pomegranate: its name means 'apple with many seeds', from the same Latin granum, 'grain', that named granite for its grainy look. Grenade belongs to the family too.
Q 03Which mineral, found in many granites as black or silvery specks, splits into paper-thin sheets?
Mica
Mica: granite's black flecks are often the mica biotite and its silvery ones muscovite, which is named after 'Muscovy glass', the clear sheets once used as window panes in Russia.
Q 04Which British Museum treasure is carved from granodiorite, a close cousin of granite?
The Rosetta Stone
The Rosetta Stone: French army engineers found the slab in 1799 while repairing a fort near Rashid in the Nile Delta, and its three scripts became the key to reading hieroglyphs.
Q 05What is the extrusive (volcanic) equivalent of granite?
Rhyolite
Rhyolite: it is granite's magma erupted at the surface, where it chills too fast for big crystals to grow, so the same ingredients set as a fine-grained lava.
Q 06A granite with some crystals much larger than the groundmass has what texture?
Porphyritic
Porphyritic: the outsized crystals are called phenocrysts. The word goes back to porphyry, the purple stone the Romans quarried in Egypt, which is speckled in just this way.
Q 07A block of granite sinks in water, but which liquid is dense enough for it to float on?
Mercury
Mercury: granite is about 2.7 times as dense as water, but mercury is about 13.5 times as dense, so a granite block would ride on it with most of its bulk above the surface.
Q 08Deep in the crust, what can lower the melting point of granite by hundreds of degrees?
Water
Water: dry granite melts at more than 1,200 °C, but water forced into the hot rock under pressure can bring that down to about 650 °C, cool enough for the deep crust to melt.
Q 09A large mass of plutonic rock exposed over more than 100 square kilometres is called what?
A batholith
A batholith: the name was coined in the 1890s from the Greek for 'depth' and 'stone', which suits a body that froze miles down. The largest are welded together from many separate intrusions.
Q 10When feldspar in granite is chemically weathered by carbonic acid, which clay mineral does it turn into?
Kaolinite
Kaolinite: the white china clay of fine porcelain, named after Gaoling, the Chinese hill where it was dug. Rain and soil water, faintly acid, slowly rot granite's feldspar into it.
Q 11Which radioactive gas, formed by the decay of uranium in granite, can collect in basements built over it?
Radon
Radon: it seeps up through cracks in floors and foundations, and the US Environmental Protection Agency ranks it second only to smoking as a cause of lung cancer.
Q 12The stone sold as "black granite" is usually which rock?
Gabbro
Gabbro: it is dark because it is rich in iron and magnesium minerals and has almost no quartz, yet once polished the stone trade sells it as 'black granite'.
Q 13Which name is shared by the ancient Egyptian granite obelisks that stand beside the Thames and in Central Park?
Cleopatra's Needle
Cleopatra's Needle: both were raised at Heliopolis for Thutmose III about 3,500 years ago, well over a thousand years before Cleopatra was born.
Q 21Which Vermont city calls itself the "Granite Center of the World"?
Barre
Barre: the Italian stonecutters its quarries drew made the town a stronghold of radical politics, with a Socialist Labor Party hall, built in 1900, that still stands and two Socialist mayors.
Q 22Which Washington memorial is a V-shaped wall of polished black granite carved with more than 58,000 names?
The Vietnam Veterans Memorial
The Vietnam Veterans Memorial: Maya Lin, a 21-year-old architecture student, won the design contest, and the stone is polished like a mirror so that visitors see their own faces among the names.
Q 23Which sculptor carved the four presidents into the granite of Mount Rushmore?
Q 14The sarcophagus inside the Great Pyramid of Giza was carved from red granite quarried where?
Aswan
Aswan: its quarries still hold an obelisk about 42 metres long, abandoned where it lay when cracks opened in the granite. Had it been raised, it would have been the tallest in Egypt.
Q 15The Brihadisvara Temple, a granite giant completed in 1010 by the Chola king Rajaraja I, stands in which country?
India
India: Rajaraja I raised it at Thanjavur in Tamil Nadu, and his builders set a single granite block of about 80 tonnes near the top of its thirteen-storey tower.
Q 16Which Scottish city, built largely from local grey stone, is nicknamed "The Granite City"?
Aberdeen
Aberdeen: its Victorian streets were built of grey granite from Rubislaw quarry on the edge of town, a pit that closed in 1971 and is now a deep flooded hole among the houses.
Q 17Which vast royal monastery did Philip II build of grey granite near Madrid?
El Escorial
El Escorial: Philip II meant it as a royal tomb as well as a monastery and palace, and almost every Spanish monarch since his father, Charles V, lies buried in its crypt.
Q 18The granite blocks of which Thames bridge were sold to an American in 1968 and rebuilt in Arizona?
London Bridge
London Bridge: Robert McCulloch bought the 1831 bridge for his new desert town of Lake Havasu City, where its granite facing now wraps a concrete frame.
Q 19Curling stones are traditionally made from granite quarried on which Scottish island?
Ailsa Craig
Ailsa Craig: one Scottish firm, Kays, has cut curling stones from its unusually tough granite for over 170 years, while the empty island itself has become a seabird sanctuary.
Q 20The Granite Railway of 1826, often called America's first commercial railroad, hauled Quincy stone for which landmark?
Bunker Hill Monument
Bunker Hill Monument: the railway ran the granite from the Quincy quarries to a wharf on the Neponset River, and boats carried it on to Charlestown for the 221-foot obelisk, dedicated in 1843.
Gutzon Borglum
Gutzon Borglum: he directed the blasting and carving from 1927 until he died in March 1941, and his son Lincoln saw the work through its last months.
Q 24About how tall is each presidential head carved into Mount Rushmore?
60 feet
60 feet: and the plan was grander still, with all four presidents carved down to the waist, until the money ran out in October 1941.
Q 25What did the Lakota name for Mount Rushmore, Tȟuŋkášila Šákpe Pahá, mean?
Six Grandfathers Mountain
Six Grandfathers Mountain: šákpe is six and tȟuŋkášila grandfather, a name tied to the six knobs along the ridge. An older Lakota name for the peak meant Cougar Mountain.
Q 26Doane Robinson, who dreamed up Mount Rushmore, first wanted the carving to show which figures?
Heroes of the American West
Heroes of the American West: he had Red Cloud, Lewis and Clark and Buffalo Bill in mind, carved on the granite spires called the Needles, until the sculptor argued that presidents would give the work national appeal.
Q 27Which Confederate general rides alongside Jefferson Davis and Stonewall Jackson on Georgia's Stone Mountain?
Robert E. Lee
Robert E. Lee: his face was begun in the 1920s by the man who went on to carve Mount Rushmore, but that work was blasted away and the present relief was finished only in 1972.
Q 28Which Inca citadel was built from granite quarried on its own mountain ridge, its finest walls fitted without mortar?
Machu Picchu
Machu Picchu: it was little known beyond its valley until 1911, when a local man, Melchor Arteaga, led the Yale scholar Hiram Bingham up to the ruins that Bingham then made world famous.
Q 29The colossal granite mountain carving begun in South Dakota's Black Hills in 1948 depicts which Lakota leader?
Crazy Horse
Crazy Horse: the Lakota elder Henry Standing Bear asked for the carving so the world would know that Native Americans have great heroes too. The face was finished in 1998, fifty years after work began.
Q 30In 1875 George Anderson became the first to climb which Yosemite landmark, once declared 'perfectly inaccessible'?
Half Dome
Half Dome: Anderson drilled his way up the smooth granite, standing on iron eye bolts as he went, and hikers now haul themselves up a pair of steel cables close to his line.