Mount Everest Trivia
0Loading crowd target
0Loading crowd target
7correct to beat the crowd
57 free Mount Everest trivia questions with answers — geography quiz, new questions added Sep 2026.
This Mount Everest trivia quiz covers the highest mountain on Earth from every angle. The easy questions are the ones every armchair explorer knows: which countries it straddles, who made the first ascent, its local names and roughly how tall it is. From there it moves into the survey story, from the Great Trigonometrical Survey's 500-kilogram theodolites and the Bengali mathematician who first computed the height to the 2020 joint measurement. The harder end is for mountaineering fans and geography buffs: Mallory and Irvine's disappearance, the 1922 first climb above 8,000 metres, the Swiss expedition that nearly beat the British, the first oxygen-free ascent, the first winter ascent, the 1996 disaster, the helicopter that landed on the summit, the spider that lives at 6,700 metres and the limestone at the top that was once a sea floor. Records for most ascents, first woman and youngest climbers are here too. Every answer was checked against encyclopaedia entries for the mountain, its expeditions and its climbers before publishing, and the supporting sentence is stored with each question. If you enjoy this one, try our Himalayas, Nepal and world geography quizzes next.
30 of 57 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which high-altitude pack animal hauls much of the expedition gear up the trail to Everest Base Camp?
Yak
Yak trains share the work with human porters, and the high trail suits them: with a dense coat and almost no working sweat glands, the animals cope badly with the warmth of lower altitudes.
Q 02China's 2005 survey put Everest over three metres below Nepal's figure because it left out what?
Summit snow cap
The summit snow cap was the sticking point: China measured to bare rock, Nepal to the snow on top, and only in December 2020 did the two jointly announce a single figure, 8,848.86 m.
Q 03What is Everest's Nepali name, shared by its national park?
Sagarmatha
Sagarmatha also names the Sagarmatha Pollution Control Committee, the local nonprofit whose staff at Base Camp check the waste that expeditions carry off the mountain.
Q 04Which of these is a common translation of Qomolangma, the Tibetan name for Everest?
Holy mother
Holy mother is one common rendering. The name was printed on a Paris map in 1733, yet the British survey that named the peak over a century later adopted no local name for it.
Q 05Under what temporary label did the British survey know Everest before it was named?
Peak XV
Peak XV replaced an even plainer tag, peak 'b', given in 1847 when surveyors first suspected it might top Kangchenjunga, then thought to be the world's highest mountain.
Q 06After whom was Everest named, at the suggestion of Andrew Waugh in the 1850s?
A former Surveyor General of India
A former Surveyor General of India, Sir George Everest, held the post just before Waugh. He objected to having the peak named after him.
Q 07How did Sir George Everest pronounce his own surname?
EEV-rist
EEV-rist, two syllables with a long first vowel, was how Sir George said his own name. The mountain named after him is almost always pronounced differently.
Q 08Which Indian mathematician is often credited with first calculating that Everest was the world's highest peak?
Radhanath Sikdar
Radhanath Sikdar was the survey's chief computer, and a popular story has him announcing the find in 1852. A historian who went through the survey's records found no sign that he took part in the calculation.
Q 09Which surveying instrument, hauled across India in the 1800s, weighed about half a tonne and needed 12 men to carry it?
Theodolite
Theodolite: a pivoting telescope that measures angles. The Great Trigonometrical Survey hoisted its giant one onto towers and temple roofs to sight distant stations, building the chain of triangles that reached the Himalayas.
Q 10In a popular story, why was Everest's first official height announced as 29,002 feet?
So it wouldn't look rounded
So it wouldn't look rounded, the tale goes: the sums gave exactly 29,000 feet and two were added for credibility. A historian who checked the survey's records found 29,002 was simply the average of six measurements.
Q 11What is the closest sea to Everest's summit?
Bay of Bengal
Bay of Bengal beaches were where Tim Macartney-Snape began walking in 1990, so that he climbed Everest's entire height from sea level instead of starting at a base camp.
Q 12What kind of rock forms the summit of Everest?
Ordovician limestone
Ordovician limestone near the top holds fragments of trilobites and crinoids, because the summit began as the floor of a shallow sea long before India collided with Asia.
Q 13What do climbers call the prominent rock layer visible just below Everest's summit pyramid?
The Yellow Band
Q 21News of the first ascent of Everest broke in London on the morning of which national occasion?
Elizabeth II's coronation
Elizabeth II's coronation was on 2 June 1953, four days after the climb. A Times correspondent with the expedition sent the news down in a coded message, so that it would break in London that morning.
Q 22Who led the 1953 British expedition that put the first climbers on the summit?
John Hunt
John Hunt, an army colonel, picked two pairs to try for the summit. The first turned back with oxygen trouble about 100 m below the top, and three days later the second pair made it.
Q 23Which nationality was Edmund Hillary?
New Zealander
The Yellow Band wraps around the mountain, so climbers on both the Nepalese and the Tibetan route have to cross its bare rock on the way to the top.
Q 14Which two tectonic plates collide to push Everest upward?
Indian and Eurasian
Indian and Eurasian plates began colliding roughly 50 million years ago, and India is still pushing north. That is why the Himalayas are still rising today.
Q 15What creature found at 6,700 m on Everest may be Earth's highest permanent resident?
A jumping spider
Euophrys omnisuperstes probably feeds on insects blown up by the wind.
Q 16Which bird did George Lowe of the 1953 expedition report seeing fly over Everest's summit?
Bar-headed goose
Bar-headed goose flocks do cross the Himalayas on migration, but the highest flight that GPS trackers have logged is about 7,300 m, well short of the summit.
Q 17Roughly what fraction of sea-level air pressure exists at Everest's summit?
One third
One third of sea-level pressure means each breath delivers about a third of the usual oxygen, which puts the summit close to the limit of what a human body can survive.
Q 18What name do climbers give Everest's highest reaches?
The death zone
The death zone leaves climbers barely able to sleep or digest food, and their thinking grows confused. Many deaths up there trace back to poor decisions made by oxygen-starved minds.
Q 19Everest's summit is tall enough to reach the lower edge of which winds?
The jet stream
The jet stream can batter the summit with winds of more than 160 km/h. That is why most climbers wait for a short calmer window in May, just before the summer monsoon.
Q 20The summit of Everest has been described as being about the size of what?
A dining room table
It is capped with snow over ice over rock, and the snow layer varies from year to year.
New Zealander Edmund Hillary was knighted in 1953, the year of the climb. Fifty years on, Nepal made him an honorary citizen for the decades he spent building schools and hospitals for the Sherpa people.
Q 24What was Edmund Hillary's occupation when he was not climbing?
Beekeeper
Beekeeper was the family trade. Hillary worked the hives with his father through the summer, which left his winters free for climbing.
Q 25Beginning in 1960, Hillary devoted himself to helping Nepal's Sherpa people through which organisation?
The Himalayan Trust
The Himalayan Trust, which Hillary founded himself, went on to build schools, hospitals and even airstrips for the Sherpa villages of the Everest region.
Q 26Which country's 1952 expedition took Tenzing Norgay to a new altitude record, a year before he reached the summit?
Switzerland
Switzerland's team, with Tenzing climbing beside Raymond Lambert, turned back a few hundred metres below the top. The Geneva Spur on the standard route still carries the name they gave it.
Q 27Which young climber vanished with George Mallory high on Everest's north side in June 1924?
Andrew Irvine
Andrew Irvine was last glimpsed climbing with Mallory when the mist briefly cleared on the afternoon of 8 June. Whether the pair reached the top before they died has been argued over ever since.
Q 28Which item did the searchers who found Mallory's body hope to find?
A camera
A camera the pair are thought to have carried might hold a summit photograph. Searchers found an altimeter, a pocketknife and letters on Mallory's body, but no camera.
Q 29What famous three-word answer did Mallory reportedly give when asked why he wanted to climb Everest?
Because it's there
Because it's there became famous, but it may be apocryphal: some suspect that the newspaper reporter who quoted Mallory coined the phrase himself.
Q 30Why did early British expeditions attempt Everest only from the Tibetan side?
Nepal did not allow foreigners in
Nepal did not allow foreigners in until about 1950, just as Chinese control closed Tibet to Western climbers. The attempts switched sides, and the first ascent came from the south.