Hypothermia Trivia
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48 free Hypothermia trivia questions with answers — science & nature quiz, new questions added Sep 2026.
Hypothermia trivia sounds grim until you look at the details, which are some of the strangest in medicine: victims who tear off their clothes because they feel hot, people who crawl under beds in their final minutes, a Swedish doctor revived from 13.7 °C after 80 minutes under ice, and a Canadian toddler whose heart restarted after two hours. This quiz covers the science of how the body loses heat, the three stages of hypothermia and what each looks like, and the myths (no, you do not lose most of your heat through your head). It also ranges outward: cold shock and why most cold-water deaths are not really hypothermia at all, the Titanic's −2 °C sea, frostbite and trench foot from Napoleon's retreat to the Western Front, wind chill, space blankets, and the animals that beat the cold, from wood frogs that freeze solid to Arctic ground squirrels running below zero. A final set covers medicine's deliberate use of cold to protect the brain after cardiac arrest and in newborns. Easy questions suit anyone with a first-aid badge; the expert tier is for medics, mountaineers and cold-water swimmers. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's medical and history articles, and the supporting sentence is attached to each question.
30 of 48 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Hypothermia is defined as a core temperature about how many degrees Celsius below normal?
2
2 °C is the whole margin, from 37 down to 35, and it doesn't take a blizzard to lose it: rain, sweat or a dunking can chill a person that far on a merely cool day.
Q 02Which symptom of mild hypothermia typically stops once the condition becomes moderate?
Shivering
Shivering is the body's own heater, so once it fades the temperature falls even faster. A cold person who stops shaking is getting worse, not better.
Q 03First-aiders are told to move a severely hypothermic person very gently because a jolt can trigger what?
A fatal heart rhythm
A fatal heart rhythm: a deeply chilled heart is so irritable that a rough lift or a bumpy carry can tip it into ventricular fibrillation.
Q 04In 'paradoxical undressing', people dying of cold strip off their clothes, most likely because they suddenly feel what?
Burning hot
Burning hot is the leading theory. The tiny muscles that clamp the skin's blood vessels shut finally tire and let go, and warm blood surges back to the surface.
Q 05In 'terminal burrowing', or hide-and-die syndrome, where do people in the last stage of hypothermia crawl?
Small enclosed spaces
Small enclosed spaces, such as under a bed or behind a wardrobe. The German pathologists who named it saw a primitive brain-stem reflex, like a hibernating animal going to ground.
Q 06Polish doctors who revived a toddler from 12.7 °C in 2014 kept him for days in what?
An artificial coma
An artificial coma followed for the two-year-old, who had slipped out of his grandmother's house on a freezing night and was found by police. When he woke, his surgeon called it a miracle.
Q 07Alcohol raises hypothermia risk partly by causing what effect in the skin's blood vessels?
Dilation
Dilation brings warm blood up to the skin, so a drinker feels warmer while actually losing heat faster.
Q 08In cold water, what does the Heat Escape Lessening Position have a person awaiting rescue do?
Hug knees to chest
Hug knees to chest: curling up shields the trunk and slows heat loss, while swimming burns energy and can shorten survival time.
Q 09Titanic officer Charles Lightoller wrote that diving into the 28 °F sea felt like a thousand what being driven into his body?
Knives
Knives, he wrote, and for a few moments he lost all grip of himself. Lightoller lived through the night by standing on an upturned lifeboat until rescue came.
Q 10Plunged into freezing seas, many victims die within the first couple of minutes from what?
Cold shock
Cold shock sets off uncontrolled gasping and a racing heart the instant skin meets the water, and one gasp taken under the surface can drown. Core temperature takes far longer to fall.
Q 11Sitting or lying on cold ground drains body heat by direct contact, a process known as what?
Conduction
Conduction is heat passing straight into whatever the body touches. Water does it far faster than air, which is why a soaking chills a person so quickly.
Q 12Doctors can spot hypothermia from an extra hump called the Osborn wave on which hospital test?
An ECG heart trace
An ECG heart trace shows the extra hump, nicknamed the camel-hump sign, and it grows taller as the patient gets colder.
Q 13Despite the old advice about hats, how does heat loss from an adult's bare head compare with other bare skin?
No greater
Q 21Bright red, cold skin is a warning sign of hypothermia in which group?
Babies
Babies lose heat faster than adults, and red, cold skin with very low energy is their warning sign, where an adult would fumble and slur words.
Q 22Anna Bågenholm, revived in 1999 after cooling to 13.7 °C under river ice, later took a job where?
The hospital that saved her
The hospital that saved her took her on as a radiologist. She spent 60 days in intensive care and woke paralysed, yet recovered well enough to ski again.
Q 23Anna Bågenholm was skiing near Narvik in which country when she fell through the ice?
Norway
Norway's Arctic north was where the Swedish trainee surgeon had gone to work. The two friends skiing with her were doctors too, and they began CPR the moment she was pulled from the water.
No greater: bare skin sheds heat at much the same rate wherever it is. The myth likely grew from 1950s military cold tests on men bundled up everywhere except the head.
Q 14Which everyday fabric do cold-weather guides warn against wearing next to the skin?
Cotton
Cotton soaks up moisture and holds it, robbing the body of heat, while wool and synthetics such as polypropylene go on insulating even when wet.
Q 15Which of these does the UK National Health Service specifically warn against for a hypothermic person?
A hot bath
A hot bath is out, along with hot water bottles, heat lamps and alcohol: the NHS says to warm the person gently with dry clothes and blankets instead.
Q 16Because deep cold can mimic death, rescuers say a hypothermia victim is not dead until they are what?
Warm and dead
Warm and dead: a chilled brain needs far less oxygen, so a person with no pulse and no breath can still come back. Doctors rewarm the body before they give up.
Q 17Doctors may stop trying to revive a hypothermia victim if a blood test shows sky-high levels of which mineral?
Potassium
Potassium above 12 millimoles per litre is one of the few accepted reasons to stop, since a victim with no pulse is otherwise rewarmed before anyone gives up.
Q 18For some aortic and brain operations, surgeons chill a patient to about 20 °C so they can safely do what?
Stop all blood flow
Stop all blood flow: with the heart halted and the brain all but silent, surgeons get a still field for half an hour or more. At normal temperature the brain would be damaged within minutes.
Q 19Which ancient general lost nearly half his men on a snowbound march during the Second Punic War?
Hannibal
Hannibal lost some 20,000 men crossing the Alps in 218 BC, yet the survivors went on to a string of victories over Rome in Italy, the greatest of them at Cannae.
Q 20Which microscopic animals can survive being frozen to about one degree above absolute zero?
Tardigrades
Tardigrades, or water bears, shrivel into a dormant 'tun' in which they stop moving, breathing and doing almost anything else, then revive when conditions improve.
Q 24Erika Nordby, Canada's 'Miracle Baby', survived wandering outdoors on a bitter February night in 2001 wearing only what?
A diaper
A diaper was all the 13-month-old had on when her mother found her in the snow. Her heart had been still for about two hours before Edmonton doctors slowly warmed her back to life.
Q 25Doctors said hiker Mitsutaka Uchikoshi, found alive after 24 days on a Japanese mountain in 2006, had entered a state like what?
Hibernation
Hibernation was his doctor's word for it: his body had cooled to 22 °C and his organs had slowed while his brain stayed protected. Other experts doubted anyone could last that long without water.
Q 26After two trials in 2002, many hospitals began chilling unconscious patients to about 33 °C for a day after what?
Cardiac arrest
Cardiac arrest starves the brain of oxygen, and the cooling was meant to limit the damage. A later trial found 36 °C did as well as 33, a hint that simply preventing fever is what helps.
Q 27Cooling caps are used during chemotherapy to prevent which side effect?
Hair loss
Hair loss is held off because the cold narrows the blood vessels in the scalp, so less of the drug reaches the hair roots. The caps help with some chemotherapy drugs but not all.
Q 28A classic early account of frostbite was written by the chief surgeon of whose army?
Napoleon's
Napoleon's chief surgeon, Dominique Jean Larrey, saw cold injury on a mass scale during the 1812 invasion of Russia. He also invented the horse-drawn 'flying ambulance' that rushed the wounded off the battlefield.
Q 29Rescuers are told not to thaw a frostbitten foot in the field if there is any risk of what?
Refreezing
Refreezing does more damage than staying frozen: tissue that thaws and then freezes again is injured more extensively, so rewarming waits until the foot can be kept warm.
Q 30Even a strong swimmer without a life jacket will soon drown in icy water, because the cold makes them lose what?
Control of their limbs
Control of their limbs goes first: chilled arms and legs stop answering long before the body's core cools. That is why a life jacket, not swimming skill, keeps a person alive in cold water.