70 free Trivia for Smart People trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
68 free hard trivia questions with answers. Super hard trivia means one thing here: nobody wins it by guessing. There are no questions about which planet is closest to the Sun. Instead you get the number of teeth on the largest gear of the Antikythera mechanism, the exclusive economic zone the Challenger Deep actually sits in, the only US state with a single-chamber legislature and the war that lasted under three-quarters of an hour. The questions run across science, history, geography, language, economics and literature. Roughly a fifth are merely difficult; the rest are hard to expert, the kind of question where knowing the neighbouring fact is not enough. Wrong answers are plausible on purpose, so a coin-flip between two options will not save you. Every question was written against a primary or encyclopaedic source and carries the sentence it came from, because a hard quiz is worthless if the hard answers are wrong. Use it as a solo gauntlet, a tie-breaker round, or the last ten minutes of a quiz night when the easy teams have gone home.
30 of 70 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01The Antikythera mechanism could predict which astronomical events decades in advance?
Eclipses
It also modelled the Moon's irregular orbit, speeding up at perigee, a motion studied by Hipparchus of Rhodes in the same century.
Q 02How many teeth did the largest gear of that ancient Greek device originally carry?
223
That count matches the Saros eclipse cycle of 223 lunar months, which is how the machine could forecast eclipses at all.
Q 03Machinery as complex as the Antikythera mechanism did not reappear until which century in western Europe?
The 14th
The device sat unnoticed in an Athens museum for two years after being raised, looking like nothing more than a lump of corroded bronze.
Q 04Besides the heavens, what four-year cycle did the Antikythera device track?
Athletic games
Conservation has since broken the single retrieved lump into 82 separate fragments, only four of which contain gears.
Q 05Radiocarbon dating placed the vellum of the Voynich manuscript in which period?
The early 15th century
Multispectral analysis also showed the pages had never been written on before, ruling out a reused palimpsest.
Q 06Which library has held the Voynich manuscript since 1969?
The Beinecke at Yale
Yale put the whole codex online in 2020, so anyone who fancies deciphering it no longer has to travel.
Q 07The Voynich manuscript's parchment was made from the skin of which animal?
Calves
Protein testing in 2014 showed at least fourteen or fifteen entire hides went into the book.
Q 08The Challenger Deep lies inside the exclusive economic zone of which country?
Federated States of Micronesia
The US monument declared over the trench in 2009 deliberately stops short of the deepest point for exactly that reason.
Q 09Water pressure at the bottom of the Mariana Trench is roughly how many times that at sea level?
1,072
That works out at about eight tons pressing on every square inch, and single-celled monothalamea live in it quite happily.
Q 10Of NASA's twin outer-planet probes launched in 1977, which lifted off first?
Voyager 2
Its twin left 16 days later on a faster trajectory and overtook it, which is why the numbering looks backwards.
Q 11NASA's choice to fly past Titan cost that mission the chance to visit which world?
Pluto
Titan won because it was already known to have a thick atmosphere, and the detour flung the probe out of the planetary plane.
Q 12Budget cuts once reduced that same craft to a Jupiter-Saturn flyby under which earlier designation?
Mariner 11
The name changed only once the spacecraft design had drifted far enough from the original programme's hardware.
Q 13The 1944 monetary conference that created the IMF was held in which US state?
New Hampshire
Delegates from 44 Allied countries deliberated at the Mount Washington Hotel for three weeks and signed on the final day.
Q 21How old is the world's deepest lake estimated to be?
Twenty-five to thirty million years
It sits in a rift valley where the crust is still pulling apart, which keeps deepening the basin instead of silting it up.
Q 22Why did the 1908 Tunguska explosion leave no crater?
The object exploded in the air
The blast still flattened a vast area of Siberian taiga, and eyewitness accounts suggest up to three people died.
Q 23The Tunguska blast is estimated at what explosive yield?
Between 3 and 50 megatons
Q 14Which 1976 agreement formally ratified the end of the Bretton Woods system?
The Jamaica Accords
The practical end came five years earlier, when the United States simply stopped converting dollars into gold.
Q 15The IBRD, founded alongside the IMF in 1944, became part of which institution?
The World Bank Group
The United States, holding two-thirds of the world's gold at the time, insisted the whole system rest on gold and its own dollar.
Q 16On what date did the United States end the convertibility of its currency into gold?
15 August 1971
Sterling and other fixed currencies floated soon afterwards, and the dollar became a fiat currency overnight.
Q 17The Rosetta Stone records a decree issued in 196 BC on behalf of which ruler?
Ptolemy V Epiphanes
Three other fragmentary copies of the same decree have since turned up, so the famous slab is no longer unique.
Q 18What kind of rock is the Rosetta Stone actually made of?
Granodiorite
White chalk in the inscriptions and a protective carnauba wax coating darkened it for a century, which is why it was long misidentified.
Q 19In which year did Jean-Francois Champollion announce his transliteration of the Egyptian scripts?
1822
The stone had been found in July 1799 by a French army officer while rebuilding a fort in the Nile Delta.
Q 20Which body of water holds between 22 and 23 percent of the world's fresh surface water?
Lake Baikal
That is more than all five North American Great Lakes combined, packed into a rift barely larger than Belgium in surface area.
It remains the largest impact event in recorded history, caused by a stony asteroid arriving at about 27 kilometres per second.
Q 24In 1897 a bill implying a false value of pi passed the House of which US state?
Indiana
The bill's real claim was that it could square the circle, offered free of royalties to the state's schools.
Q 25Who happened to be in the legislature that day and killed the pi bill?
A Purdue mathematics professor
C. A. Waldo was there on other business, saw the vote coming, and briefed the senators before it could reach them.
Q 26Squaring the circle with straightedge and compass had already been proved impossible in 1882 by whom?
Ferdinand von Lindemann
His proof that pi is transcendental settled a question that had been open since antiquity, fifteen years before the bill was drafted.
Q 27Which institution created and funds the sixth Nobel, the prize in economic sciences?
Sveriges Riksbank
Sweden's central bank endowed it in 1968 for its own 300th anniversary, and the first award followed in 1969.
Q 28How many patents did Alfred Nobel hold in his lifetime?
355
He also bought the Bofors ironworks in 1894 and turned it into a major arms manufacturer, which sharpened his interest in a peace prize.
Q 29Who is the youngest person ever to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, at 41?
Rudyard Kipling
The prize has gone to writers in 25 languages, and has been shared between two people on only four occasions.
Q 30Who was the oldest literature laureate, aged 88 when the call came in 2007?
Doris Lessing
Of 121 laureates to 2024, only 18 have been women, and the prize was withheld entirely on seven occasions.