High School Trivia
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159 free High School trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
These 80 trivia questions for high school students are random high school trivia in the literal sense: a question from every classroom on the timetable, shuffled together. You will meet the Pythagorean theorem and the quadratic discriminant from math, mitochondria and Mendel's peas from biology, pH and noble gases from chemistry, Newton's third law from physics, the Louisiana Purchase and the 13th Amendment from US history, the Bastille and the Berlin Wall from world history, and the books everyone was assigned, from Romeo and Juliet to The Great Gatsby and Lord of the Flies. It works two ways. Students can use it as a quick review before finals, a bell-ringer in class or a fun trivia game for a club meeting. Adults can use it to find out how much of high school actually stuck; the questions start easy and end with a few that most graduates have long since forgotten. Every answer was checked against an encyclopedia entry or primary source before publication, and each one comes with a one-line explanation that adds something you probably did not learn in class. Because every question comes straight from the high school curriculum, it also works as trivia for 15 year olds and up: a freshman or sophomore should recognise most of it, and the hard ones make a fair challenge for older teens.
30 of 159 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Whose theorem says the square of a right triangle's hypotenuse equals the sum of the squares of the other sides?
Pythagoras
Babylonian clay tablets show the relationship was known a thousand years before Pythagoras was born; he just got the naming rights.
Q 02Pi is the ratio of a circle's circumference to what?
Its diameter
Pi is the ratio of a circle's circumference to its diameter, about 3.14159, so every circumference is just over three times the diameter.
Q 03What do the interior angles of any triangle add up to?
180 degrees
The interior angles of any flat triangle sum to 180 degrees, a result proved in Euclid's Elements (Book I, Proposition 32) around 300 BC.
Q 04What is the only even prime number?
2
Every other even number is divisible by 2, so it has a factor besides itself and 1 and cannot be prime.
Q 05In the quadratic formula, the expression b² − 4ac is called what?
The discriminant
The discriminant b² − 4ac tells how many real roots a quadratic has: negative means none, zero means one repeated root, positive means two.
Q 06The imaginary unit i is defined by which equation?
i² = −1
It lets every polynomial have a full set of roots, and it shows up in real-world electrical engineering as the letter j.
Q 07What is the highest possible score on the SAT?
1600
The SAT tops out at 1600: two sections scored 200 to 800 each. It ran to 2400 from 2005 to 2016, when a separate writing section was added.
Q 08Which organelle is nicknamed the 'powerhouse of the cell'?
The mitochondrion
The phrase comes from a 1957 Scientific American article, and mitochondria carry their own separate DNA, inherited only from your mother.
Q 09Adenine, cytosine and guanine are three of DNA's four bases; what is the fourth?
Thymine
The fourth DNA base is thymine, which pairs with adenine through two hydrogen bonds; RNA replaces thymine with uracil.
Q 10What shape do the two strands of DNA form?
A double helix
DNA's two strands twist into a double helix, the structure Watson and Crick published in 1953 using X-ray diffraction images from Rosalind Franklin's lab.
Q 11Gregor Mendel worked out the basic laws of heredity by breeding which plants?
Peas
He grew tens of thousands of pea plants in a monastery garden between 1856 and 1863, and his results were ignored for decades.
Q 12Which type of cell division produces sperm and egg cells?
Meiosis
Meiosis produces sperm and egg cells through two rounds of division, ending with four haploid cells that each carry one copy of every chromosome.
Q 13Which pigment do plants use to absorb light for photosynthesis?
Chlorophyll
Chlorophyll absorbs red and blue light to power photosynthesis and reflects green, which is why leaves look green.
Q 21Newton's third law says that for every action there is what?
An equal and opposite reaction
Newton's third law: every action has an equal and opposite reaction. A rocket throws exhaust backward and the exhaust pushes the rocket forward with equal force.
Q 22Roughly how fast does light travel in a vacuum?
300,000 km per second
Light travels about 300,000 km per second in a vacuum, exactly 299,792,458 metres per second; since 1983 that value has defined the metre.
Q 23The Ring of Fire, home to about 90 percent of the world's earthquakes, surrounds which ocean?
Pacific
Q 14People with which blood type are called universal donors for red blood cell transfusions?
O negative
O negative red cells carry no A, B or Rh antigens, so they can be given to patients of any blood type; AB positive is the universal recipient.
Q 15Which element has atomic number 1?
Hydrogen
Hydrogen, with a single proton, is element 1 and the lightest; it makes up roughly three-quarters of the universe's normal matter by mass.
Q 16On the pH scale, what value is neutral?
7
Below 7 is acidic and above 7 is basic; each step is a tenfold change, so pH 5 is a hundred times more acidic than pH 7.
Q 17Helium, neon, argon and krypton belong to which group of elements?
Noble gases
Helium, neon, argon and krypton are noble gases, group 18 of the periodic table; their full outer electron shells make them almost completely unreactive.
Q 18Who published the first widely accepted periodic table in 1869?
Dmitri Mendeleev
Dmitri Mendeleev's 1869 table left gaps for undiscovered elements and predicted their properties; gallium (1875) and germanium (1886) later filled two of them.
Q 19How many chemical elements are on the modern periodic table?
118
The modern table holds 118 elements; the seventh row was completed with the 2010 discovery of tennessine (117), and the last four elements were named in 2016.
Q 20Avogadro's number, the number of particles in one mole, is about 6.022 times ten to what power?
23
Avogadro's number is 6.022 × 10^23 particles per mole, so a mole of water, about 18 grams, holds that many molecules.
The Ring of Fire is a roughly 40,000 km horseshoe of trenches and volcanic arcs rimming the Pacific Ocean, where oceanic plates sink beneath their neighbours.
Q 24What is the capital of Australia?
Canberra
Canberra was purpose-built as a compromise between rivals Sydney and Melbourne; Parliament moved there from Melbourne in 1927.
Q 25Which language has the most native speakers in the world?
Mandarin
Mandarin Chinese has roughly 940 million native speakers, far ahead of Spanish at about 485 million; English leads only once second-language speakers are counted.
Q 26In which year did the American Civil War end?
1865
The Civil War ended in 1865, when Robert E. Lee surrendered to Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox Court House on April 9, 1865.
Q 27Which amendment to the US Constitution abolished slavery?
The 13th
The 13th Amendment, ratified December 6, 1865, abolished slavery except as punishment for a crime; the 14th granted citizenship and the 15th protected voting rights regardless of race.
Q 28How many amendments make up the Bill of Rights?
10
The Bill of Rights is the first 10 amendments, ratified in 1791. Congress sent twelve in 1789; the congressional-pay one was finally ratified in 1992 as the 27th.
Q 29The United States bought the Louisiana Territory in 1803 from which country?
France
Napoleon's France sold the territory for about 15 million dollars in 1803, roughly 18 dollars per square mile, doubling the size of the United States.
Q 30How many years is 'four score and seven', the opening of Lincoln's Gettysburg Address?
87
A score is twenty, so four score and seven is 87 years: in 1863 Lincoln was counting back to the Declaration of Independence of 1776.