Middle School Trivia
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119 free Middle School trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
70 free trivia questions for middle school students, with answers. Middle school is when trivia gets good: you finally know enough science, history and geography to be dangerous, and you still have room to be surprised. This quiz has seventy questions across the subjects a sixth-to-eighth grader meets in a week, plus a full pop culture round on the shows, games, movies and music that fill the rest of their time: Stranger Things, Wednesday, Fortnite, Among Us, Spider-Verse, Inside Out 2, Olivia Rodrigo, BTS and KPop Demon Hunters. The easy questions are ones most 11-year-olds will nail (which planet is biggest, what a prime number is, who wrote Charlotte's Web). The medium ones take a bit of thought. The hard ones will stump plenty of teachers, from the number of bones a baby is born with to the price the United States paid for Alaska. Everything is age-appropriate and every answer has been checked against a published source and carries a link, so it is safe to use as a classroom trivia game, at a family dinner or on a long car ride. No trick questions, just facts worth knowing.
30 of 119 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which gas do plants release as a by-product of photosynthesis?
Oxygen
Oxygen: the plant splits water molecules and releases their oxygen, so the gas comes from water rather than from the carbon dioxide it takes in.
Q 02Which part of the cell is nicknamed the 'powerhouse of the cell'?
Mitochondrion
Mitochondrion: it even carries its own DNA, inherited from the mother, and that DNA resembles a bacterium's, a clue to where mitochondria came from.
Q 03Which chemical element has the symbol Na?
Sodium
Sodium: Na comes from natrium, a name taken from natron, the salt ancient Egyptians used to dry out mummies.
Q 04Who discovered cells in 1665 by looking at a slice of cork under a microscope?
Robert Hooke
Robert Hooke: what he actually saw were only the walls of the cork's cells, which he likened to the pores of a honeycomb.
Q 05DNA is made of four bases: adenine, guanine, cytosine and which other?
Thymine
Thymine: it always pairs with adenine across the double helix, and it was named after the calf thymus glands it was first isolated from.
Q 06Which chemist published the first widely accepted periodic table in 1869?
Dmitri Mendeleev
Dmitri Mendeleev: he left gaps for undiscovered elements and predicted their properties, and gallium, found in 1875, filled one of those gaps.
Q 07Which gas makes up about 78% of the air we breathe?
Nitrogen
Nitrogen: most living things can't use it straight from the air, so life depends on bacteria that convert it into compounds plants can absorb.
Q 08How many bones does an adult human skeleton have?
206
206: a newborn has far more, and the number falls as many of them fuse together while a child grows.
Q 09Where is the human body's smallest bone?
Ear
Ear: in the condition otosclerosis, its tiny stapes becomes stuck in place, so it can't vibrate and hearing suffers.
Q 10In a thunderstorm, why do you see distant lightning before you hear its thunder?
Sound travels far more slowly
Sound travels far more slowly than light, taking about five seconds to cover a mile, so counting after a flash tells you roughly how far away it struck.
Q 11Which planet is the largest in the Solar System?
Jupiter
Jupiter: when Galileo spotted four moons circling it, he showed that not everything in the sky orbits Earth.
Q 12Mercury is closer to the Sun, so why is Venus the hotter planet?
Its thick atmosphere traps heat
Its thick atmosphere traps heat, and Venus spins so slowly that one turn on its axis takes 243 Earth days, longer than its 225-day year.
Q 13What are the names of Mars's two small moons?
Phobos and Deimos
Phobos and Deimos: Phobos creeps about 2 metres closer to Mars every century, so in tens of millions of years it will crash into Mars or break up into a ring.
Q 21Which SI unit was defined by a metal cylinder near Paris until 2019?
Kilogram
Kilogram: the cylinder and its official copies gradually drifted apart in mass, so scientists redefined the unit using the Planck constant.
Q 22John Adams died on July 4, 1826, the Declaration's 50th anniversary, on the same day as which founder?
Thomas Jefferson
Thomas Jefferson: the two old political rivals had rebuilt their friendship through years of letters before dying on the same day.
Q 23Which amendment in the Bill of Rights protects freedom of speech and religion?
The First Amendment
The First Amendment: Congress sent the states twelve amendments and this one was third, but the first two weren’t ratified in 1791, so it moved to the top.
Q 14Which element does the Sun make in its core by nuclear fusion?
Helium
Helium: astronomers spotted it in sunlight during an 1868 eclipse, decades before it was found on Earth, so its name comes from the Greek word for the Sun.
Q 15Which astronaut stepped onto the Moon right after Neil Armstrong?
Buzz Aldrin
Buzz Aldrin: their Apollo 11 crewmate Michael Collins flew all the way to the Moon but never walked on it, circling alone in the command module Columbia.
Q 16What do the interior angles of any flat triangle add up to?
180 degrees
180 degrees, but only on a flat surface: the angles of a triangle drawn on a sphere, such as a globe, always add up to more.
Q 17Pi is the ratio of a circle's circumference to what?
Its diameter
Its diameter: around 250 BC, Archimedes trapped pi between 223/71 and 22/7 by drawing 96-sided polygons inside and outside a circle.
Q 18What is the only even prime number?
2
2: every larger even number can be divided by 2, so it has a factor other than 1 and itself and can't be prime.
Q 19Whose theorem says the square on a right triangle's hypotenuse equals the sum of the squares on the other two sides?
Pythagoras's
Pythagoras's name is on it, but Babylonian mathematicians were using the rule more than a thousand years before he was born.
Q 20In Roman numerals, which letter stands for 500?
D
D: the letter is said to be half of CIↃ, an early way of writing 1,000.
Q 24Which leader sold the Louisiana Territory to the United States?
Napoleon Bonaparte
Napoleon Bonaparte sold it after his army failed to crush a slave revolt in Saint-Domingue, now Haiti, and a new war with Britain loomed.
Q 25Which US Secretary of State negotiated the purchase of Alaska from Russia?
William Seward
William Seward: Russia preferred to sell to the United States rather than risk losing the colony to its great rival, Britain.
Q 26Which president was in office when the Civil War began at Fort Sumter?
Lincoln
Lincoln: his election had led seven slave states to leave the Union, and four more followed once the fighting began.
Q 27Which biblical nickname did Harriet Tubman earn for guiding enslaved people to freedom?
Moses
Moses: she returned to slave territory again and again to lead people out, and later said she never lost a passenger.
Q 28In which city did Rosa Parks refuse to give up her bus seat?
Montgomery
Montgomery: her arrest set off a bus boycott lasting more than a year, which ended when the Supreme Court ruled segregated buses unconstitutional.
Q 29At which event did Martin Luther King Jr. give his 'I Have a Dream' speech?
The March on Washington
The March on Washington was organized partly to pressure the Kennedy administration into backing a strong federal civil rights bill.
Q 30The Statue of Liberty was a gift to the United States from which country?
France
France: the French people paid for the statue, but Americans had to fund its pedestal, and Joseph Pulitzer's newspaper appeal rescued it when money ran out.