Interesting Trivia
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140 free Interesting trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
These are the trivia questions people repeat to friends afterwards. Sharks are older than trees. Cleopatra lived closer to the Moon landing than to the pyramids. Oxford was teaching students two centuries before the Aztecs founded their capital. Cats cannot taste sweetness, the Amazon has no bridges, and a German church is halfway through a concert that will take 639 years. There are 140 questions here, spread across space, science, animals, history, geography, food, technology, music, art and games. Every question has one right answer, three plausible wrong ones and a short explanation that adds the detail worth remembering. Nothing here is a myth or an urban legend: each fact was checked against an encyclopaedia or primary source before it went in, and every question shows its source. Difficulty runs from things you half-remember to things you will swear cannot be true. Play the set straight through, or use it to run the round of a quiz that people actually talk about afterwards.
30 of 140 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Teaching at which university is recorded as early as 1096?
Oxford
It is the world's second-oldest university in continuous operation; only Bologna, from 1088, is older.
Q 02Cleopatra was born in 69 BC. Which of these events happened closest in time to her life?
Apollo 11 in 1969
The Great Pyramid went up around 2600 BC, roughly 2,500 years before her, while the first Moon landing came just under 2,000 years after her death.
Q 03Which of these appeared on Earth first?
Sharks
Shark-like fish were swimming in the Devonian over 400 million years ago; the first trees appeared later in that same period, and dinosaurs not until about 230 million years ago.
Q 04Which planet has the hottest surface in the Solar System, at around 464 C?
Venus
A runaway greenhouse atmosphere of carbon dioxide traps the heat, and the surface pressure is 92 times Earth's.
Q 05Claude Shannon's famous figure of roughly 10 to the power of 120 is a lower-bound estimate of what?
Possible games of chess
Claude Shannon worked it out in his 1950 paper that founded computer chess; the figure comfortably exceeds the estimated number of atoms in the observable universe.
Q 06Laser ranging to Apollo reflectors shows the Moon drifting away from Earth by about how much per year?
3.8 centimetres
The same tidal tug slows Earth's spin, which is why leap seconds were introduced in 1972.
Q 07Which animal's skin secretes 'blood sweat', a red fluid that works as sunscreen and antibiotic?
Hippopotamus
The secretion is colourless at first and turns red-orange within minutes; its two pigments absorb ultraviolet light.
Q 08How long was Gustave Eiffel's concession to run his tower before the city could dismantle it?
20 years
It survived because it became useful for radio, joining the International Time Service in 1910.
Q 09Lightning heats nearby air to about what temperature, several times hotter than the Sun's surface?
30,000 C
An average negative bolt carries about 30,000 amperes and a gigajoule of energy in a few thousandths of a second.
Q 10For thousands of years up to about 5,000 years ago, which desert was covered in grasses, trees and lakes?
The Sahara
The African humid period was driven by wobbles in Earth's axial tilt that strengthened the monsoon; rock art from the time shows swimmers and cattle.
Q 11Measured from its base on the sea floor rather than sea level, which mountain is taller than Everest?
Mauna Kea
About 6,000 metres of the Hawaiian volcano is hidden underwater; from base to summit it tops 10,000 metres.
Q 12Vanilla flavouring comes from the cured seed pods of what kind of plant?
An orchid
The pods must be hand-pollinated outside Mexico because the bee that does the job naturally lives only there.
Q 13Before the Spanish conquest, what did Mesoamerican peoples commonly use cocoa beans as?
Currency
A rabbit dinner or a few tamales could be paid for in beans; the Aztecs also drank chocolate bitter and spiced.
Q 21Alexander Bain patented an early version of which device in 1843, over 30 years before the telephone?
The fax
His 'Electric Printing Telegraph' scanned images line by line and sent them down a wire.
Q 22Tsutomu Yamaguchi is the only person officially recognised by Japan as having survived what?
Both atomic bombings
He was on a business trip to Hiroshima on 6 August 1945 and made it home to Nagasaki in time for the second bomb; he lived to 93.
Q 23Which country's Althing, founded in 930, is called the world's oldest legislature?
Iceland
It first met at Thingvellir, an open-air site about 45 km east of Reykjavik.
Q 14Olympus Mons, the tallest volcano in the Solar System, rises roughly how far above the surface of Mars?
22 km
That is about two and a half times the height of Everest; weak gravity and no plate movement let it keep growing over one hotspot.
Q 15Roughly what share of the Solar System's total mass is contained in the Sun?
99.86%
Its mass is about 330,000 times that of Earth; Jupiter accounts for most of the little that is left.
Q 16What happens to an astronaut's height after a month in weightlessness?
It increases by about 2.5 cm
With no gravity compressing the spine, the skeleton fully extends; the gain reverses within days of landing.
Q 17Which part of the human body has no blood vessels and gets its oxygen from the air via tears?
The cornea
Blood vessels would spoil its transparency, so it is one of the few tissues that can be transplanted without tissue-type matching.
Q 18Woolly mammoths were still alive on Wrangel Island until roughly when?
4,000 years ago
That means a mammoth herd was grazing off Siberia while the Great Pyramid was already several centuries old.
Q 19In what year was the guillotine last used in France, the same year the first Star Wars film opened?
1977
Hamida Djandoubi was executed in Marseille that September; France abolished the death penalty four years later.
Q 20Anne Frank was born in June 1929. Which American civil rights leader was born the same year?
Martin Luther King Jr.
He was born Michael King Jr. in Atlanta on January 15, 1929, five months before her.
Q 24How many letters does the modern official Hawaiian alphabet have?
13
Five vowels, seven consonants and the okina glottal stop, which is why so many place names look like they repeat.
Q 25Which country has around 840 living languages, more than any other on Earth?
Papua New Guinea
English and the creole Tok Pisin serve as the common tongues among its many small language groups.
Q 26Which microscopic animals, nicknamed water bears, have survived the vacuum of space?
Tardigrades
In 2007 dehydrated specimens rode a Russian satellite for ten days in vacuum and came back to life.
Q 27Which Mexican salamander can regrow lost limbs, gills and even parts of its brain?
Axolotl
Its genome, published in 2018, is ten times the size of ours and was the largest animal genome sequenced at the time.
Q 28Cockroaches can survive for a while without their heads. What lets them keep breathing?
They breathe through openings in their body, not the head
With no lungs and an open circulatory system, the body just keeps ticking until it dies of thirst.
Q 29How long is a giraffe's tongue?
About 45 cm
It is dark and prehensile, and the animal can tip its head more than 90 degrees to strip leaves from branches directly overhead.
Q 30Under its white or yellowish fur, what colour is a polar bear's skin?
Black
The dark skin sits beneath a thick layer of fat; the fur itself is made of hollow, transparent hairs.