Lake Ontario
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40 free Lake Ontario trivia questions with answers — geography quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Lake Ontario is the last link in the Great Lakes chain and the smallest of the five by surface area, but it punches well above its size. Canada's biggest city sits on its north shore, upstate New York lines its south, and everything that flows out of the other four lakes passes through it on the way to the ocean. These questions collect the best fun facts about Lake Ontario: how it compares with its neighbours, the towns and islands around it, the creatures and legends in it, and the sailors, soldiers and record-setting swimmers who crossed it. Along the way you will meet a haunted lighthouse, a serpent from Seneca legend and a baseball first that happened at an island ballpark. Most of the quiz is pitched so that curious kids, families and classrooms can play along, with a handful of harder questions for Great Lakes locals and quiz hosts. Every answer comes with a short explanation, so you pick up something new even when you guess wrong.
30 of 40 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which baseball legend hit his first professional home run in 1914 at an island ballpark on Lake Ontario?
Babe Ruth
Babe Ruth was a young pitcher for the visiting Providence Grays when he cleared the wall at Hanlan's Point in Toronto. It was the only home run he ever hit as a minor leaguer.
Q 02The Toronto Islands in Lake Ontario hold North America's largest urban community living without which everyday thing?
Cars
Cars are kept off the islands, which sit just offshore from downtown Toronto and are reached by ferry. The chain's 15 islands also shelter the city's harbour.
Q 03Which landmark near the Lake Ontario shore in Toronto was the world's tallest free-standing structure from 1975 to 2007?
CN Tower
The CN Tower held the record for 32 years, until Dubai's Burj Khalifa passed it. The letters stand for Canadian National, the railway company that built it as a broadcasting mast.
Q 04Which American state has shoreline on four of the five Great Lakes, missing only Lake Ontario?
Michigan
Michigan's four-lake border gives it the longest freshwater coastline of any US state, about 3,288 miles. Lake Ontario lies too far east to touch it.
Q 05Lake Ontario has the smallest surface of the five Great Lakes, but it beats larger Lake Erie on which measure?
Water volume
Water volume is where Lake Ontario wins: it holds about 1,640 cubic kilometres against Lake Erie's 480, more than three times as much in a smaller footprint.
Q 06US troops crossed Lake Ontario to burn York's legislature in 1813; which American home did Britain torch a year later?
White House
The White House burned in August 1814, partly in retaliation for the looting of York, the town now called Toronto. A violent thunderstorm put out the flames the next day.
Q 07Vineyards on the Niagara Peninsula beside Lake Ontario are famous for a sweet wine pressed from grapes in which state?
Frozen
Frozen grapes give up their sugar while their water stays behind as ice, so the juice is intensely sweet. Ontario makes over 90% of Canada's ice wine, and Canada makes more than any other country.
Q 08Which Toronto schoolgirl, aged 16, became the first person to swim across Lake Ontario in September 1954?
Marilyn Bell
Marilyn Bell swam for almost 21 hours through high waves while lamprey eels attacked her arms and legs. The American star Florence Chadwick, offered $10,000 to make the crossing, gave up partway.
Q 09Seneca legend says a giant serpent called Gaasyendietha lives in Lake Ontario; what is the creature said to spew?
Fire
Fire is both weapon and transport for Gaasyendietha, which is said to cross the sky on a blazing trail. That is why the serpent is often likened to the dragons of European legend.
Q 10Lake-effect snow blowing off Lake Ontario often makes which New York city the snowiest large city in the United States?
Syracuse
Syracuse sits about 40 miles inland, yet winter winds crossing the warmer lake pick up moisture and drop it as snow that far away. Nearby Tug Hill gets more snow than anywhere else in the eastern US.
Q 11Which river is Lake Ontario's outlet, carrying the water of all five Great Lakes toward the Atlantic Ocean?
St. Lawrence
The St. Lawrence River runs about 500 km from the lake before widening into its estuary. Because Lake Ontario is last in the chain, water from every other Great Lake passes through it.
Q 12The Toronto Islands in Lake Ontario were a peninsula joined to the mainland until 1858, when what cut them off?
A storm
A storm in April 1858 tore a channel 150 metres wide through the sandbar, and it never closed again. The opening is still there today and is known as the Eastern Gap.
Q 13Elizabeth Simcoe named the tall cliffs on Lake Ontario in east Toronto in 1793 after which English seaside town?
Scarborough
Q 21Which island, named after the British general killed winning Quebec in 1759, is the largest in Lake Ontario?
Wolfe
Wolfe Island is also the largest of the Thousand Islands, sitting right where the lake pours into its outlet river. It was called Grand Island until 1792.
Q 22A fast catamaran ferry built in Australia ran across Lake Ontario from 2004, linking Toronto with which American city?
Rochester
Rochester's fast ferry, marketed as The Breeze, soon failed and the ship was sold in 2007. It later carried passengers between Spain and Morocco across the Strait of Gibraltar.
Q 23A rocket-launched test model of which cancelled Canadian jet fighter was found on the floor of Lake Ontario in 2017?
Avro Arrow
Scarborough in North Yorkshire came to mind because the pale bluffs looked to her like chalk cliffs, and she talked of building a summer house there. The name later spread to the whole township.
Q 14Which city at Lake Ontario's eastern end became the first capital of the united Province of Canada in 1841?
Kingston
Kingston kept the title for only three years, from 1841 to 1844. The city grew up around a fort founded in 1673, which makes it one of the oldest settlements on the Great Lakes.
Q 15Which canal lifts ships up the Niagara Escarpment between Lake Ontario and Lake Erie, bypassing Niagara Falls?
Welland
The Welland Canal uses eight locks to carry ships the 99.5 metres between the two lakes. It first opened in 1829 and has been rebuilt several times to take larger vessels.
Q 16What nickname is given to the densely populated region wrapped around Lake Ontario's western end, home to Toronto?
Golden Horseshoe
The Golden Horseshoe takes the first half of its name from the region's wealth and the second from the curve of the shoreline. More than a fifth of Canada's people live there.
Q 17Which city at Lake Ontario's western tip is known as the Steel Capital of Canada for the mills on its harbour?
Hamilton
Hamilton's two big steelmakers, Stelco and Dofasco, were founded in 1910 and 1912 and went on to make sixty percent of the country's steel.
Q 18The Darlington plant on Lake Ontario's north shore supplies about a fifth of Ontario's electricity from which source?
Nuclear
Nuclear reactors at Darlington, four of them, produce enough electricity for a city of two million people. An older plant at Pickering, also on the lakeshore, is among the oldest in the world.
Q 19Lake Ontario has iced over completely only five times on record; which feature of the lake usually keeps it open?
Its depth
Its depth, 244 metres at the lowest point, keeps the lake as a whole from icing over, so ice usually forms only along the shores and in bays. The last complete freeze was in 1934.
Q 20The national marine sanctuary created in Lake Ontario's New York waters in 2024 was set up mainly to protect what?
Shipwrecks
Shipwrecks and other maritime history are what the sanctuary protects, along with places sacred to the Haudenosaunee. It was the third national marine sanctuary on the Great Lakes and the first in New York waters.
Avro Arrow test models were launched on rocket boosters from Point Petre in the 1950s to try out the design. The fighter itself was cancelled in 1959 and the finished airframes were ordered destroyed.
Q 24Which European power built Old Fort Niagara in the 1720s to control the mouth of the Niagara River on Lake Ontario?
France
France put up a fortified house there in 1726 and enlarged the fort in 1755 as war with Britain loomed. The post later passed to the British and then to the United States.
Q 25Ned Hanlan, raised on the Toronto Islands in Lake Ontario, was world champion from 1880 to 1884 in which sport?
Rowing
Rowing made Ned Hanlan, a single sculler, what Rowing Canada calls the country's first individual sporting hero. Hanlan's Point on the islands took its name from his father's hotel.
Q 26The airport on the Toronto Islands in Lake Ontario is named after which Canadian flying ace of the First World War?
Billy Bishop
Billy Bishop was credited with 72 victories, the most of any Canadian or British Empire pilot of the war, and won the Victoria Cross. Travellers reach the island airport through a pedestrian tunnel.
Q 27American eels, once a major catch in Lake Ontario, leave fresh water to spawn far out in which part of the Atlantic?
Sargasso Sea
The Sargasso Sea is where every American eel hatches and where adults return to breed after 10 to 25 years in fresh water. In some years eels made up almost half the value of Lake Ontario's commercial catch.
Q 28Which UNESCO-listed canal links Lake Ontario with Ottawa, where part of it becomes a huge skating rink each winter?
Rideau
The Rideau Canal runs 202 km and is the oldest continuously operated canal system in North America. It opened in 1832 and today carries pleasure boats.
Q 29HMS Ontario, a British warship found largely intact on Lake Ontario's floor in 2008, sank during which conflict?
Revolutionary War
The Revolutionary War vessel went down in a gale in 1780, only five months after her launch and without ever seeing battle. She was the largest British warship on the Great Lakes at the time.
Q 30The Gibraltar Point Lighthouse on Lake Ontario, the oldest standing on the Great Lakes, is said to be haunted by whom?
Its first keeper
Its first keeper, John Paul Radelmüller, was murdered in 1815; local lore says soldiers had come looking for his beer. Two soldiers were charged and acquitted, and the ghost story has endured ever since.