History and Geography Trivia
0Loading crowd target
0Loading crowd target
6correct to beat the crowd
100 free History and Geography trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
History and geography are the two rounds every pub quiz leans on, and the best questions sit where they meet: a calendar quirk that moved a revolution by a fortnight, a war that was over before the kettle boiled. This round alternates the two subjects question by question, so nobody at the table gets to coast. The 100 questions range across every continent and three thousand years: the queen who lived closer to the Moon landing than to the pyramids, the state that is somehow its country's easternmost and westernmost, the peaceful divorce that split one nation in two, the nutmeg island traded for Manhattan. Each answer comes with a one-line explanation that adds the detail a good quizmaster would read out. Use it as a ready-made round for a quiz night, a warm-up for a trivia team, or a quick test of how much of school actually stuck. Play on your phone with instant feedback, or print the lot for the table.
30 of 100 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which Egyptian queen, who died in 30 BC, lived closer to the Moon landing than to the Great Pyramid's construction?
Cleopatra
Cleopatra died in 30 BC, roughly 2,500 years after the Great Pyramid was built but only about 2,000 before Apollo 11 landed in 1969; she was Egypt's last active pharaoh.
Q 02Which country, the largest on Earth without a permanent river, gets about half its drinking water from desalination?
Saudi Arabia
Saudi Arabia is the largest country in the world without permanent rivers, so around 50% of its drinking water comes from desalinated seawater. Seasonal wadis carry water only after rare rains.
Q 03Which US state's islands cross the 180th meridian, making it technically the easternmost state as well as the westernmost?
Alaska
Alaska's Aleutian Islands stretch across the 180th meridian into the Eastern Hemisphere, so one state holds the country's northern, western and, on paper, eastern extremes.
Q 04Which sultanate fought Britain on 27 August 1896 in a war that was over in under 45 minutes?
Zanzibar
Zanzibar surrendered after 38 to 45 minutes of British naval bombardment, making the Anglo-Zanzibar War the shortest recorded war in history. Britain then installed a sultan of its own choosing.
Q 05Thanks to the isthmus's bend, the Panama Canal's Pacific end lies in which direction from its Atlantic end?
Southeast
Southeast: the canal runs south from Colón and then swings east, so its Pacific end sits about 25 miles east of its Atlantic end, not west.
Q 06Which English university, teaching by 1096, is more than three centuries older than the Aztec Empire?
Oxford
Oxford was teaching by 1096, and the Aztec Triple Alliance formed only in 1428; even Cambridge began in 1209 with scholars who fled Oxford after clashes with the townspeople.
Q 07Which country, on 1 April 2001, became the first in the world to legalise same-sex marriage?
Netherlands
The Netherlands began at the stroke of midnight: Amsterdam's mayor, Job Cohen, married four couples in a ceremony broadcast live on national television.
Q 08Which bay between New Brunswick and Nova Scotia has the highest tides on Earth?
Bay of Fundy
The Bay of Fundy owes its record tides to its shape: the long, funnel-like basin makes the incoming Atlantic tide pile up as it runs inland between the two provinces.
Q 09Which South Asian country elected Sirimavo Bandaranaike in 1960, making her the world's first female prime minister?
Sri Lanka
Sri Lanka, then called Ceylon, turned to her after her husband, the prime minister, was assassinated in 1959: his party persuaded the widow to lead it, and it won the 1960 election.
Q 10Which Southeast Asian archipelago of about 7,641 islands has Luzon and Mindanao as its two largest?
Philippines
The Philippines was long credited with 7,107 islands; the tally rose to 7,641 after the national mapping agency charted hundreds of previously uncounted ones in 2016.
Q 11Which African country, bordering the Spanish exclaves Ceuta and Melilla, has both an Atlantic and a Mediterranean coast?
Morocco
Morocco claims both cities, but each has been Spanish for centuries: Melilla since 1497 and Ceuta since 1580.
Q 12Which country was carved up by three neighbours in 1772, 1793 and 1795 and vanished from the map for 123 years?
Poland
Poland disappeared when its three imperial neighbours completed the third partition in October 1795, and it did not return as a sovereign state until 1918. The Kościuszko Uprising of 1794 had failed to prevent it.
Q 13Which Italian volcano, over 3,300 m tall and almost constantly active, dominates the east coast of Sicily?
Etna
Q 21Which Caribbean island, the second-largest after Cuba, is shared by Haiti and the Dominican Republic?
Hispaniola
Hispaniola covers 76,192 km², with the Spanish-speaking Dominican Republic holding the eastern two-thirds and French- and Creole-speaking Haiti the west; it is the most populous island in the West Indies.
Q 22Which civilisation's Long Count calendar completed a cycle of more than 5,000 years on 21 December 2012, sparking doomsday predictions?
Maya
The Maya Long Count simply rolled over into a new cycle that day, counted from a base date in August 3114 BC; no ancient Maya text foretold an ending, as scholars and NASA kept pointing out.
Q 23Which desert fills the Tarim Basin in Xinjiang, its northern and southern edges skirted by two branches of the Silk Road?
Etna's height is never settled: the summit grows as eruptions pile up new rock and shrinks when the crater rim collapses, so surveys run from about 3,320 to 3,400 metres.
Q 14In which Central American country do bull sharks swim up the San Juan River into a lake that shares the country's name?
Nicaragua
Nicaragua's great lake holds sharks and tarpon as well as freshwater fish, and bull sharks tagged there have turned up in the Caribbean after riding the San Juan River's rapids almost like salmon.
Q 15Which Norse explorer, founder of the settlement the sagas call Vinland, reached America five centuries before Columbus?
Leif Erikson
Leif Erikson named the land Vinland for the grapes found there; in one saga he reached it only because his ship was blown off course on the way to Greenland.
Q 16Which sandy, semi-arid expanse, with the vast Makgadikgadi salt pans, covers much of Botswana and parts of Namibia?
Kalahari Desert
The Kalahari Desert covers almost all of Botswana, yet it is no empty waste: rivers flowing south from Angola spill into its swamps and salt pans, flooding part of a region short of water.
Q 17Which country split peacefully into two republics on 1 January 1993, in what was dubbed the 'Velvet Divorce'?
Czechoslovakia
Czechoslovakia's Velvet Divorce borrowed its name from the bloodless Velvet Revolution that ended Communist rule in 1989; Czech and Slovak leaders settled the split in talks.
Q 18Which Asian city was known as Batavia under Dutch rule until the Japanese occupation renamed it in 1942?
Jakarta
Jakarta was Jayakarta until the Dutch captured and razed it in 1619 and built the walled town of Batavia on the ruins; the Japanese occupiers brought the old name back.
Q 19Which country lost more than a fifth of its population to death and emigration in the Great Famine that began in 1845?
Ireland
Ireland lost about a million people to hunger and disease and at least a million more to emigration after blight ruined the potato, the crop its rural poor lived on.
Q 20Which South American country, independent from the Dutch since 1975, is the continent's smallest by area and population?
Suriname
Suriname kept Dutch as its official language, and tens of thousands of its people moved to the old colonial power as independence approached.
Taklamakan Desert
The Taklamakan Desert is walled in by the Tian Shan, Kunlun and Pamir ranges, and Silk Road caravans split into northern and southern routes along its rim rather than cross the sands.
Q 24Which US president bought Louisiana from France in 1803 for $15 million, nearly doubling the country's territory?
Thomas Jefferson
Thomas Jefferson had long wanted New Orleans, and Napoleon offered all of Louisiana after failing to crush the revolt in Saint-Domingue and facing renewed war with Britain; the 828,000 square miles cost under three cents an acre.
Q 25Which mountain range, with the microstate Andorra tucked among its peaks, walls off the Iberian Peninsula from the rest of Europe?
Pyrenees
The Pyrenees became the Franco-Spanish border under a 1659 treaty that gave France the villages of one high valley but not its town, Llívia, which is still a pocket of Spain inside France.
Q 26Which country was proclaimed an empire in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles in January 1871, while still at war with France?
Germany
Germany's princes acclaimed Prussia's King Wilhelm I as emperor in the French kings' own palace while their armies were still besieging Paris; France signed an armistice ten days later.
Q 27Which African capital, named Léopoldville by Henry Morton Stanley for Belgium's king, took its present name in 1966?
Kinshasa
Kinshasa took its present name during Mobutu Sese Seko's drive to replace colonial names with African ones; it honours Nshasa, the village that stood there before the colonial town.
Q 28In which ancient city did Alexander the Great die in 323 BC, aged 32?
Babylon
Babylon is where he fell ill after his return from India; he died in the old palace of Nebuchadnezzar II after about two weeks of fever, a month short of his 33rd birthday.
Q 29Which densely populated country lies largely on the delta of the Ganges and Brahmaputra rivers?
Bangladesh
Bangladesh sits on the world's largest river delta; until 1971 it was East Pakistan, ruled from a capital more than 1,500 km away on the far side of India.
Q 30Ararat, the peak on Armenia's coat of arms and the legendary resting place of Noah's Ark, stands in which country?
Turkey
Turkey holds the whole mountain, in its far east where the Turkish, Iranian and Armenian borders meet, yet Ararat looms over Armenia's capital, Yerevan, from across the frontier.