Keyboard Shortcuts
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40 free Keyboard Shortcuts trivia questions with answers — science & nature quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Keyboard shortcuts are the quiet superpower of anyone who spends the day at a computer. One quick press of a couple of keys can replace a trip through several menus, and the people who know plenty of them seem to finish the same work in half the time. This quiz covers the combinations people actually use: copying and pasting, switching between windows, taming a browser full of tabs, and the function keys along the top row. It mixes Windows and Mac, adds questions on Chrome, YouTube, Excel and PowerPoint, and tells the stories of where the most famous key presses came from. It suits office workers, students and anyone who wants to reach for the mouse less often. Most questions are everyday knowledge, some will teach you a trick worth keeping, and a handful are aimed at people who already know their way around a terminal.
30 of 40 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Pressing the Shift key five times in a row turns on which Windows accessibility feature?
Sticky Keys
Sticky Keys lets you press the parts of a shortcut one at a time instead of holding them together, which helps people who cannot press two keys at once.
Q 02The Ctrl+Alt+Delete reboot shortcut was written in 1981 by an engineer at which computer company?
IBM
IBM engineer David Bradley wrote the reset code in a matter of minutes while building the original PC. He meant it only for developers, not for the public.
Q 03Which Windows shortcut pastes text, using a letter that sits beside the cut and copy keys?
Ctrl+V
Ctrl+V keeps paste next to cut and copy: X, C and V sit side by side at the left end of the keyboard's bottom row, all under one hand.
Q 04Which Microsoft figure said in 2013 that using Ctrl+Alt+Delete to log in to Windows was a mistake?
Bill Gates
Bill Gates said he had wanted a single dedicated button, but the keyboard's designers would not add one, so users were left holding three keys at once.
Q 05Pressing the Windows key and the period key together opens which pop-up tool in Windows 10 and 11?
Emoji panel
The emoji panel appears wherever you are typing, so there is no need to copy symbols from a web page. The Windows key plus the semicolon opens it too.
Q 06Which shortcut, in Windows since version 1.0, switches between open windows without the mouse?
Alt+Tab
Alt+Tab opens the Task Switcher: hold Alt and keep tapping Tab to step through your windows, then let go to jump to the one highlighted.
Q 07Which PC key, often sharing its keycap with SysRq, traditionally captures the whole Windows display?
Print Screen
Print Screen once did what its name says: under MS-DOS it sent whatever text was on the display straight to the printer.
Q 08Which command is run by pressing Ctrl+Z in most Windows programs, or Cmd+Z on a Mac?
Undo
Undo reverses your last action, and in many programs pressing the shortcut again and again steps back through earlier changes as well.
Q 09Pressing Alt+F4 with no windows open offers to shut down the PC, but what does it do to an open app?
Closes it
Alt+F4 closes it, shutting the active window and usually the whole program with it. With nothing open, Windows asks whether to shut down instead.
Q 10Cut, copy and paste were pioneered in the 1970s by Larry Tesler's team at which company?
Xerox
Xerox ran the PARC lab in Palo Alto, where Tesler named the commands and built them into text editors from 1974. Apple made them famous a decade later.
Q 11Which three-key Windows shortcut opens Task Manager directly, skipping the menu of security options?
Ctrl+Shift+Esc
Ctrl+Shift+Esc jumps straight to Task Manager, handy when a frozen program needs ending fast. The better-known three-key salute only reaches it through a menu of options.
Q 12Which function key reloads the current page in Chrome and refreshes the active window in Windows?
F5
F5 is the refresh key across Windows, and in Chrome adding Shift makes the reload ignore cached files and fetch the whole page again.
Q 13On a Mac, which shortcut shows or hides the Spotlight search field for locating apps and files?
Cmd+Space
Cmd+Space opens Spotlight, which doubles as a calculator: type a calculation into the search field and the answer appears without opening another app.
Q 21Pressing the Windows key and D reveals what, then brings your open windows back when pressed again?
The desktop
The desktop appears because every open window is hidden at once, a quick way to reach a file or icon buried behind them.
Q 22On YouTube, which letter key pauses the video, sitting between the keys that skip 10 seconds?
K
K sits between J and L, which jump back and forward ten seconds, so three neighboring keys run the player without touching the mouse.
Q 23In Chrome, adding Shift does it for every open tab, but what does Ctrl+D do with the current page?
Bookmarks it
Ctrl+D bookmarks it so the page can be found again later, and with Shift added Chrome files every open tab into a new bookmarks folder.
Q 14On a Mac, which shortcut quits the current app rather than just shutting its front window?
Cmd+Q
Cmd+Q quits the current app outright, whereas the W version shuts only the front window and the H version merely hides the app from view.
Q 15In Chrome on Windows, which shortcut reopens a tab you just shut, adding a key to the new-tab one?
Ctrl+Shift+T
Ctrl+Shift+T is the new-tab shortcut plus Shift, and pressing it repeatedly keeps bringing back earlier tabs that were shut.
Q 16In Windows, which shortcut erases a file for good instead of moving it to the Recycle Bin?
Shift+Delete
Shift+Delete removes the file without the Recycle Bin's safety net, so there is nothing to restore if you change your mind.
Q 17Pressing the Windows key and the letter L together does what to a PC that is signed in?
Locks it
Windows key plus L locks it instantly, so nobody can use the PC until you sign back in, which makes it the shortcut to hit when leaving a desk.
Q 18In Chrome on Windows, pressing either Ctrl+F or the F3 key opens which part of the browser?
Find Bar
The Find Bar hunts for a word on the page you are viewing, and pressing Ctrl+G afterwards hops to the next match.
Q 19Pressing the Windows key and the letter E together opens which program on a Windows 11 PC?
File Explorer
File Explorer opens, not the Edge browser: the shortcut goes back to Windows 95, when the same file manager was called Windows Explorer.
Q 20In Chrome, Ctrl plus Shift plus N opens which browsing mode, known in Microsoft Edge as InPrivate?
Incognito
Incognito mode discards the session's history and cookies when the window shuts, so nothing is left behind for the next person who uses the device.
Q 24In Chrome on Windows, pressing F11 turns on which view, which holding down Esc turns off again?
Full screen
Full screen hides the browser's tabs and toolbars so the page fills the whole display, and pressing F11 a second time brings them back.
Q 25In Windows, pressing F2 with a file highlighted lets you do what without opening a menu?
Rename it
Rename it: F2 turns the file's name into an editable box, and in Excel the same key lets you edit the contents of the active cell.
Q 26In Windows, the Home key jumps to the beginning of a line, but where does Ctrl+Home move the cursor?
Start of the document
Start of the document: adding Ctrl stretches the Home key's jump from one line to the whole file, and Ctrl+End does the same for the very end.
Q 27Which command is run by pressing Ctrl+S in Windows programs, or Cmd+S on a Mac?
Save
Save kept its floppy disk icon long after the disks themselves vanished, because they were once so common that everyone recognized the picture.
Q 28In a Windows folder, Ctrl+A does what to the files inside, as it also does to the text on a page?
Selects them all
Ctrl+A selects them all in one go, whether that means every file in a folder or every word in an essay, ready to copy or move.
Q 29On a Mac, which three-key shortcut opens the Force Quit window, the Mac's answer to Ctrl+Alt+Delete?
Cmd+Option+Esc
Cmd+Option+Esc lists every running app so a frozen one can be shut down on its own, without restarting the whole Mac.
Q 30In Chrome, pressing the space bar on a website does what, with Shift reversing the direction?
Scrolls down the page
Space scrolls down the page a screenful at a time, the same job as Page Down, so a long article can be read with one thumb on the biggest key.