80 free Insurance trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
53 free Insurance trivia questions with answers. Insurance is older than banks, older than paper money and older than most countries: Babylonian merchants were paying to have shipping loans forgiven 3,700 years ago. This quiz follows the trade from the Code of Hammurabi through the Great Fire of London and Edward Lloyd's coffee house to the bell that still hangs in Lloyd's Underwriting Room, the Titanic policy, and the fire company Benjamin Franklin organised in Philadelphia. It also covers the words the industry uses (deductibles and excesses, actuaries, subrogation, retrocession, utmost good faith), the mascots everyone recognises (the gecko, the duck, Flo, Snoopy, the Rock of Gibraltar), the big American programmes (Social Security, Medicare, the Affordable Care Act, the FDIC) and the odd corners such as pet insurance and Michael Flatley's legs. It suits agents, actuaries, finance students and anyone who has ever argued with a claims adjuster. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia or an official source, and the citation is shown under each question.
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Q 01Which Babylonian legal text of c.1750 BC had shipping-loan rules seen as early insurance?
Code of Hammurabi
If a merchant paid his lender an extra sum, the loan was cancelled should the shipment be lost at sea, which is a premium in all but name.
Q 02The first known stand-alone insurance contract, dated 1347, was written in which Italian city?
Genoa
Genoese merchants also invented insurance pools backed by pledges of landed estates, and Venice set up a specialised marine-insurance court in 1436.
Q 03In which year did the Great Fire of London happen?
1666
It began at Thomas Farriner's bakery in Pudding Lane and destroyed more than 13,000 houses in four days.
Q 04Which English economist set up the first fire insurance company, the "Insurance Office for Houses", in 1681?
Nicholas Barbon
His father, Praise-God Barebone, reportedly baptised him If-Jesus-Christ-had-not-died-for-thee-thou-hadst-been-damned.
Q 05In the 1700s, British insurers marked insured buildings with metal plaques for their brigades. What were they called?
Fire marks
By 1825 they had become more advertisement than identification, and genuine period plaques are now valuable enough that fakes are made.
Q 06Which insurer, dating from 1710, is described as the earliest still-existing property insurance company?
Sun Fire Office
It was also the first to issue the metal identification plaques that its brigade looked for on burning buildings.
Q 07Where in London did Edward Lloyd open the 1680s coffee house that became Lloyd's of London?
Tower Street
It moved to Lombard Street in 1691, where Lloyd installed a pulpit from which shipping news and auction prices were read out.
Q 08What are the individual private backers of the Lloyd's of London market traditionally called?
Names
For most of Lloyd's history they backed policies with all of their personal wealth, and the asbestos losses of the early 1990s bankrupted around 1,500 of them.
Q 09'Underwriter' comes from Lloyd's backers signing beneath the risk details on which document?
A slip
Each backer accepted a share of the risk on a sea voyage in exchange for a premium, and the term spread to banking and securities.
Q 10What is the Latin motto of Lloyd's of London?
Fidentia
It means confidence, and sits alongside the market's guiding phrase about utmost good faith between underwriters and brokers.
Q 11The Lloyd's Underwriting Room bell came from which frigate, wrecked off the Dutch coast in 1799?
HMS Lutine
Most of the gold and silver, valued by Lloyd's at about £1.2 million, has never been recovered from the shifting sandbanks.
Q 12A single stroke of the Lutine Bell in Lloyd's Underwriting Room told the market what about an overdue vessel?
It had been lost
Two strokes meant good news; the practical purpose was to halt trading in overdue reinsurance on that vessel the instant its fate was known.
Q 13What was the annual premium for insuring Titanic's hull for £1 million?
£7,500
The rate was 15 shillings per £100, and Lloyd's paid the White Star Line the full sum within 30 days of the sinking.
Q 21What is the British English term for what US insurers call a deductible?
The excess
Choosing a higher one usually buys a cheaper premium, since the insurer no longer handles the many small claims a customer could bear.
Q 22What is it called when a reinsurer passes part of a risk on to yet another reinsurer?
Retrocession
Layers of this practice created the London market 'spiral' after the 1988 Piper Alpha explosion, when syndicates found they held the same loss several times over.
Q 23An insurer that pays a claim may "stand in the shoes" of its customer against the party at fault. What is this called?
Subrogation
Q 14After the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, Lloyd's underwriter Cuthbert Heath told his local agent to do what?
Pay every claim in full
Other insurers were disputing whether earthquake policies covered fire damage; Heath's decision cemented Lloyd's reputation in the American market.
Q 15Lloyd's reportedly insured which part of Riverdance star Michael Flatley's body for $47 million?
His legs
The policy only applied while he was touring and forbade him from dancing anywhere except on stage.
Q 16The Lloyd's building at 1 Lime Street, completed in 1986, was designed by which architect?
Richard Rogers
It stands on the site of the old Roman Forum, and the facade of the 1925 building survives stranded beside it on Leadenhall Street.
Q 17Which Founding Father organised the Philadelphia Contributionship fire insurer in 1752?
Benjamin Franklin
It refused to insure wooden houses at all, and it is still the nation's oldest property insurance company.
Q 18In 1781 the Philadelphia Contributionship annoyed customers by requiring them to remove what from outside their houses?
Trees
A rival insurer that let customers keep them became known as the Green Tree company, with a green tree on its plaque.
Q 19Which astronomer published the first life table in 1693, using Breslau's birth and death records?
Edmond Halley
His analysis let the British government price life annuities by the buyer's age, and it is seen as a founding event in demography.
Q 20Which job title did Edward Rowe Mores give the Equitable Society's chief official in 1762?
Actuary
The Equitable was the world's first mutual insurer and the first to price long-term life policies by age using James Dodson's mathematics.
The insurer's rights are wholly derivative, so it can never recover more than the customer could have.
Q 24Economists' modern study of "moral hazard" began in the 1960s with which Nobel-winning economist?
Kenneth Arrow
The phrase itself dates to the 17th century, when English insurers used it to imply outright fraud by the insured.
Q 25Which of these professional reinsurers was founded in 1863?
Swiss Re
The earliest specialist reinsurer was the Cologne Reinsurance Company of 1846; its larger Bavarian rival followed in 1880.
Q 26Insurance contracts are governed by the principle of "utmost good faith", known by which Latin phrase?
Uberrima fides
It obliges the insured to disclose all material facts, the opposite of the buyer-beware rule that governs most other contracts.
Q 27What do the letters in the auto insurer GEICO stand for?
Government Employees Insurance Company
Despite the name it has always been private; Leo and Lillian Goodwin founded it in 1936 to sell to federal workers.
Q 28Warren Buffett wrote up GEICO in 1951 while studying at Columbia under which value-investing mentor?
Benjamin Graham
Berkshire Hathaway finally bought the 49 percent of GEICO it did not already own in January 1996 for $2.3 billion.
Q 29Berkshire Hathaway's first move into insurance, in March 1967, was the purchase of which Omaha company?
National Indemnity
It cost $8.6 million; decades later the same subsidiary took on the pre-1993 liabilities of Lloyd's members through the Equitas deal.
Q 30Before British actor Jake Wood, which American sitcom star was among the voices of the GEICO Gecko?
Kelsey Grammer
The company spent over $1.1 billion on advertising in 2012, and its Cavemen campaign spun off a short-lived ABC sitcom.