Marshall Islands Trivia
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50 free Marshall Islands trivia questions with answers — geography quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
The Marshall Islands are 29 coral atolls and five islands scattered across 1.9 million square kilometres of the central Pacific, with barely 180 square kilometres of land between them: more than 98 percent of the country is lagoon. This quiz covers the geography that makes the place unique (the two parallel chains named for sunrise and sunset, Kwajalein's enormous lagoon, an average elevation of two metres) and the seafaring culture that settled it, from breadfruit-wood outriggers to the famous stick charts that mapped ocean swells. History runs from the Spanish sightings of 1526 through the British captain who lent his name, German copra traders and the 1885 protectorate, the Japanese mandate, the American invasion of 1944 and the 67 nuclear tests that followed, including Castle Bravo at Bikini and the world's first hydrogen bomb at Enewetak. Then it reaches the present: independence in 1979, the Compact of Free Association, the Nitijela and its 33 senators, the first female president, the flag with the most-pointed star of any nation, the world's largest shark sanctuary and the ship registry that is second only to Panama's. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's articles on the Marshall Islands, Bikini Atoll, Castle Bravo, Kwajalein, Majuro and the flag, and each question carries the sentence that supports it.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01The Marshall Islands lie in which ocean?
The Pacific
The Pacific: the islands lie about halfway between Hawaii and Australia, so far from shipping lanes and big populations that the United States chose them in 1946 to test its nuclear weapons.
Q 02What is the capital and largest city of the Marshall Islands?
Majuro
Majuro: its centre, Delap-Uliga-Djarrit, is named for three separate islets that were joined by landfill into one strip of town, and about half the country now lives on the atoll.
Q 03The Marshall Islands' land area roughly matches which city's?
Washington, D.C.
Washington, D.C.: the 29 atolls and five islands hold only about 181 square kilometres of dry land, yet they are scattered across an expanse of ocean thousands of times larger.
Q 04What are the Marshall Islands' two parallel island chains called?
Ratak and Ralik
Ratak and Ralik: Ratak, the eastern chain, sees the dawn first and means 'sunrise', while Ralik, the western chain, means 'sunset'.
Q 05Which company first reached orbit in 2008, launching from a tiny islet in the Marshall Islands after three failures?
SpaceX
SpaceX was close to bankruptcy after three failures when its fourth Falcon 1 finally reached orbit from Omelek, an islet inside a US Army missile range.
Q 06Like the Marshall Islands, which Indian Ocean nation of coral atolls is the world's lowest-lying country?
Maldives
The Maldives: in 2009 its president held a cabinet meeting underwater to show what rising seas would do to a country of low coral islands, a threat the Marshall Islands share.
Q 07What is the average elevation of the Marshall Islands above sea level?
About 2 metres
About 2 metres: each atoll is a cap of coral and sand resting on the rim of a long-sunken volcano, so the land never rises far above the reef it grew on.
Q 08Which atoll, the largest in the Marshall Islands, hosts the US Army's missile-testing range?
Kwajalein
Kwajalein: the Army leases much of the atoll, so most Marshallese who work on the base commute by boat from nearby Ebeye, one of the most densely populated islands in the region.
Q 09The Marshall Islands are named after a sea captain of which nationality?
British
British: Captain John Marshall sailed through in 1788 in the Scarborough, fresh from landing convicts in New South Wales with the First Fleet, and charted the islands on his way to China.
Q 10Which European power's ships were the first to sight the Marshall Islands, in the 1520s?
Spain
Spain: its navigators crossed the islands on voyages to and from the Spice Islands but found no wealth worth exploiting, so the atolls went largely unmapped for more than 250 years.
Q 11In 2014 castaway José Salvador Alvarenga washed ashore in the Marshall Islands after more than a year adrift from which country?
Mexico
Mexico: he set out on a fishing trip from Chiapas in late 2012, was blown out to sea in a storm, and lived on raw fish, birds, turtles and rainwater until his boat reached Ebon Atoll.
Q 12Marshallese navigators built stick charts to map what?
Ocean swell patterns
Marshallese stick charts mapped ocean swell patterns, showing with lashed palm ribs and shells how swells bend and cross around atolls; navigators memorised them and left them ashore.
Q 13Traditional Marshallese sailing canoes, called walaps, were built from the wood of which tree?
Breadfruit
Q 21Fallout from the 1954 Castle Bravo test on a fishing crew helped inspire which movie monster, released that year?
Godzilla
Godzilla opens with the monster destroying a ship, a direct reference to the real trawler caught in Bravo's fallout months earlier; the 15-megaton blast was 2.5 times bigger than planned.
Q 22Castle Bravo's fallout sickened the crew of a Japanese fishing boat known in English by which name?
Lucky Dragon
Lucky Dragon: ash from the blast fell on all 23 crew, who came home sick, and one died months later; the outcry over contaminated fish back home launched a mass movement against nuclear weapons.
Q 23The battleship Nagato, sunk at Bikini in the 1946 nuclear tests, had been the flagship that signalled the start of which attack?
Pearl Harbor
Breadfruit wood made the hull and outrigger, and builders bound the timbers together with coconut-fibre rope; the largest walaps could carry dozens of people between atolls.
Q 14Who sits on the Marshall Islands' advisory Council of Iroij?
Traditional chiefs
Traditional chiefs: iroij families held such sway that the country did not have a commoner as president until 2000, when Kessai Note took office.
Q 15Which empire made the Marshall Islands a protectorate in the 1880s?
Germany
Germany: its trading firms already dominated the islands' commerce, and Berlin left much of the running of its new protectorate to those companies, based on Jaluit Atoll.
Q 16Which product drove the Marshall Islands' colonial economy in the 19th century?
Copra
Copra, the dried flesh of coconuts pressed for oil, became the South Seas' great trade good in the 1860s; in the Marshalls the firms that bought it grew powerful enough to be left running much of the colony.
Q 17Which country seized the Marshall Islands in 1914 and later ran them as a League of Nations mandate?
Japan
Japan took the islands within weeks of entering the First World War, held them under the League's mandate, and later built the airfields that US forces fought to capture in 1944.
Q 18Olympic runner Louis Zamperini reached the Marshall Islands in 1943 after 47 days adrift on a raft; which bestseller tells his story?
Unbroken
Unbroken, by Laura Hillenbrand, tells how Zamperini survived a strafing bomber and weeks of thirst on the raft, only to be captured as he reached land and held prisoner for more than two years.
Q 19The Marshall Islands sued nine nuclear powers in which court?
International Court of Justice
The International Court of Justice could hear only three of the nine cases, filed in 2014, because the other six states reject its jurisdiction, and in 2016 it threw those out as well.
Q 20Bikini hosted the famous tests, but which other Marshallese atoll saw the first hydrogen bomb, 'Mike', explode in 1952?
Enewetak
Enewetak: the blast erased the islet of Elugelab and left a crater almost two kilometres wide; the device, fuelled with supercooled liquid deuterium, was far too bulky to be dropped as a weapon.
Pearl Harbor: Admiral Yamamoto sent the coded order 'Climb Mount Niitaka' from Nagato; less than five years later the US Navy anchored her among its target ships, and the second bomb sank her.
Q 24Shortly before Louis Réard named his 1946 swimsuit after Bikini Atoll, what had rival Jacques Heim called his own tiny two-piece?
The Atome
The Atome was sold as 'the world's smallest bathing suit', so Réard pitched his bikini as smaller still, and had to hire a casino dancer to model it because no fashion model would wear it.
Q 25Bikini Atoll received which international designation in 2010?
UNESCO World Heritage Site
UNESCO World Heritage Site: Bikini was listed in 2010 for what the bomb tests left behind, a fleet of warships on the lagoon floor and a crater more than a mile wide in the reef.
Q 26What is the Runit Dome?
A concrete cap over radioactive waste
A concrete cap over radioactive waste: in the late 1970s US troops dumped contaminated soil and debris into a bomb crater on Runit and sealed it under 18 inches of concrete, which locals call the Tomb.
Q 27The Marshall Islands' national holiday on 1 May marks which 1979 event?
A new constitution
A new constitution took effect on 1 May 1979 and brought self-government under the country's first president, but full independence came only in 1986, so the national day honours the earlier date.
Q 28Which agreement governs the Marshall Islands' relationship with the United States?
Compact of Free Association
The Compact of Free Association, first in force in 1986 and since renewed, gives the United States defence responsibility and funding duties while letting Marshallese live and work in the US without visas.
Q 29What currency does the Marshall Islands use?
The US dollar
The US dollar arrived with American rule after the Second World War and stayed when the trusteeship ended, with US grants paying for much of the islands' budget ever since.
Q 30What is the name of the Marshall Islands' legislature?
Nitijela
The Nitijela chooses the president from among its own 33 members and can remove one too: in 2016 it voted out a president after only two weeks in office.