Insurance Trivia
0Loading crowd target
0Loading crowd target
7correct to beat the crowd
79 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.
30 of 79 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which Babylonian legal text of c.1750 BC had shipping-loan rules seen as early insurance?
Code of Hammurabi
The Code of Hammurabi freed a merchant's agent from repaying a trade loan if robbers seized the goods on the journey, shifting the loss to the lender, a risk transfer seen as early insurance.
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 03The Great Fire of London, which spurred the first fire insurers, happened in which year?
1666
The Great Fire of 1666 began at Thomas Farriner's bakery in Pudding Lane and destroyed more than 13,000 houses in four days, creating the demand that the first fire insurance offices met.
Q 04Which English economist set up the first fire insurance company, the "Insurance Office for Houses", in 1681?
Nicholas Barbon
Nicholas Barbon, a physician turned property developer, set up the Insurance Office for Houses with eleven associates at the back of the Royal Exchange in 1681, insuring brick houses rebuilt after the Great Fire.
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 London insurer, founded in 1710, is described as the oldest surviving property insurance company?
Sun Fire Office
Sun Fire Office, founded in London in 1710, merged into Sun Alliance and then Royal & Sun Alliance, the group later renamed RSA, which is why it is described as the oldest surviving property insurer.
Q 07Where in London did Edward Lloyd open the 1680s coffee house that became Lloyd's of London?
Tower Street
Edward Lloyd's coffee house stood on Tower Street from about 1686 before moving to Lombard Street in 1691, where it became the meeting place for ship owners and marine underwriters.
Q 08What are the individual private backers of the Lloyd's of London market traditionally called?
Names
Names are the individuals who, under unlimited liability, backed Lloyd's syndicates with their entire personal wealth; the asbestos and pollution losses of 1988 to 1992 ruined many of them.
Q 09'Underwriter' comes from Lloyd's backers signing beneath the risk details on which document?
A slip
A slip was the sheet on which a Lloyd's broker set out the voyage and its risk; each backer wrote his name and share beneath it, and the term underwriter spread to banking and securities.
Q 10What is the Latin motto of Lloyd's of London?
Fidentia
Fidentia is Latin for confidence, and it is the motto displayed on the Lloyd's of London coat of arms.
Q 11The Lloyd's Underwriting Room bell came from which frigate, wrecked off the Dutch coast in 1799?
HMS Lutine
HMS Lutine sank off Vlieland on 9 October 1799 carrying about £1.2 million in gold and silver, most of it never recovered; her bell, salvaged in 1858, was hung in the Lloyd's Underwriting Room.
Q 12One stroke of the Lloyd's Underwriting Room bell signalled what about an overdue ship?
It had been lost
One stroke of the bell carried a verdict on the overdue ship: It had been lost. Two strokes meant a safe arrival, so underwriters stopped trading reinsurance on the vessel the moment its fate was known.
Q 13What was the annual premium for insuring Titanic's hull for £1 million?
£7,500
Q 21What is the British English term for what US insurers call a deductible?
The excess
The excess is the British term for the first slice of a claim the policyholder bears; choosing a higher excess usually buys a cheaper premium because the insurer no longer handles many small claims.
Q 22What is it called when a reinsurer passes part of a risk on to yet another reinsurer?
Retrocession
Retrocession is reinsurance of reinsurance; layers of it created the London market 'spiral' after the 1988 Piper Alpha explosion, when syndicates found they held the same loss several times over.
Q 23Which doctrine lets an insurer that paid a claim sue the party at fault?
Subrogation
The rate was 15 shillings per £100, so insuring £1 million of hull cost £7,500 a year, and the claim was paid in full after the April 1912 sinking.
Q 14After the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, Lloyd's underwriter Cuthbert Heath told his local agent to do what?
Pay every claim in full
Heath's telegram said to Pay every claim in full, irrespective of policy terms, while other insurers disputed whether fire policies covered fires caused by the earthquake; the decision cemented Lloyd's reputation in the American market.
Q 15Lloyd's reportedly insured which part of Riverdance star Michael Flatley's body?
His legs
His legs were the insured asset: Michael Flatley's legs were covered through Lloyd's during his Riverdance and Lord of the Dance years, with a reported value in the tens of millions of dollars.
Q 16The Lloyd's building at 1 Lime Street, completed in 1986, was designed by which architect?
Richard Rogers
Richard Rogers designed the inside-out Lloyd's building, with lifts, ducts and stairs on the outside; completed in 1986 on the site of East India House, it was Grade I listed in 2011.
Q 17Which Founding Father organised the Philadelphia Contributionship fire insurer in 1752?
Benjamin Franklin
Benjamin Franklin organised the Philadelphia Contributionship for the Insurance of Houses from Loss by Fire in 1752, a mutual modelled on London's fire offices and the oldest American property insurer.
Q 18In 1781 the Philadelphia Contributionship annoyed customers by requiring them to remove what from outside their houses?
Trees
Trees in front of a house were banned because they hindered firefighting; the 1784 rival Mutual Assurance Company accepted them and became known as the Green Tree company from the tree on its plaque.
Q 19Which astronomer published the first life table in 1693, using Breslau's birth and death records?
Edmond Halley
Edmond Halley's 1693 paper used Breslau's records of births and burials to construct a life table giving the odds of surviving each further year, and it is seen as a founding work of demography.
Q 20Which job title did Edward Rowe Mores give the Equitable Society's chief official in 1762?
Actuary
Actuary was the title Mores chose for the chief official of the Society for Equitable Assurances, founded in 1762 on James Dodson's mathematics; the word came from the Latin actuarius, a clerk or account keeper.
Subrogation lets the insurer step into its customer's shoes to recover from the party at fault; its 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
Kenneth Arrow's 1963 paper on the welfare economics of medical care brought moral hazard into modern economics, and he shared the 1972 Nobel memorial prize in economics.
Q 25Which of these professional reinsurers was founded in 1863?
Swiss Re
Swiss Re was founded in Zürich in 1863 after the Glarus fire of 1861 exposed how little capacity Swiss insurers had; the earliest specialist reinsurer, Cologne Re, dated from 1846.
Q 26Insurance contracts are governed by which Latin principle requiring full disclosure of material facts?
Uberrima fides
Uberrima fides, utmost good faith, obliges the insured to disclose all material facts before the contract is made, the opposite of the buyer-beware rule that governs most other sales.
Q 27What do the letters in the auto insurer GEICO stand for?
Government Employees Insurance Company
Government Employees Insurance Company was never a government body; Leo and Lillian Goodwin founded it in San Antonio in 1936 to sell low-cost car insurance to federal workers and military officers.
Q 28Warren Buffett wrote up GEICO in 1951 while studying at Columbia under which value-investing mentor?
Benjamin Graham
Benjamin Graham taught Buffett at Columbia and chaired GEICO, which is why Buffett visited its Washington office in 1951 and wrote the article 'The Security I Like Best' recommending the stock.
Q 29Berkshire Hathaway's first move into insurance, in March 1967, was the purchase of which Omaha company?
National Indemnity
National Indemnity, bought from Jack Ringwalt for $8.6 million in March 1967, was the same subsidiary that decades later 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
Kelsey Grammer, the Frasier star, supplied the Gecko's original voice when the character debuted in 1999, before British voices took over the role.