Multiple Choice Trivia
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80 free Multiple Choice trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
Every question here is a proper multiple choice question: four options, exactly one correct, and the wrong ones are chosen to be believable rather than obvious. The set deliberately jumps around, from the fall of the Berlin Wall and the Ides of March to Uranus, marzipan, the Wimbledon grass and the man who co-founded Apple and sold his stake for $800. Use it as a general knowledge multiple choice quiz for a pub night, a classroom starter, a road trip or just to see how you score. Difficulty is mixed on purpose. Roughly a third of the questions are easy enough for anyone at the table, most sit in the middle, and a handful at the harder end (Cleopatra's dynasty, Freddie Mercury's birthplace, the Pony Express) are there so nobody gets a perfect score without earning it. Each answer was checked against the relevant Wikipedia article and the supporting sentence is stored with the question, so you can trust the answer key when someone at the table argues. If you want more, our General Knowledge and Trivia for Smart People sets use the same format.
30 of 80 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01In which year did the Berlin Wall come down?
1989
The Berlin Wall fell in 1989: on the evening of 9 November 1989 East Germany announced free crossing, and crowds opened the checkpoints that night.
Q 02Julius Caesar was assassinated on the Ides of March in which year?
44 BC
Caesar was stabbed on 15 March 44 BC by conspirators led by Brutus and Cassius, three days before he was due to leave for a Parthian campaign.
Q 03Napoleon's final defeat in June 1815 came at which battle?
Waterloo
Waterloo, fought on 18 June 1815 in present-day Belgium, saw Wellington and Blücher end Napoleon's Hundred Days; he was exiled to Saint Helena.
Q 04The storming of the Bastille, the flashpoint of the French Revolution, happened in which year?
1789
The Bastille was stormed on 14 July 1789; the fortress held just seven prisoners at the time, four of them forgers.
Q 05Cleopatra was the last active ruler of which Egyptian dynasty?
Ptolemaic
Cleopatra VII was the last active ruler of the Ptolemaic dynasty, founded by Ptolemy I, a Macedonian general under Alexander; Plutarch says she was the first Ptolemy to learn Egyptian.
Q 06Archduke Franz Ferdinand, whose 1914 assassination triggered World War I, was shot in which city?
Sarajevo
Gavrilo Princip shot the Archduke in Sarajevo on 28 June 1914; the Bosnian capital had been annexed by Austria-Hungary only six years earlier, in 1908.
Q 07World War II is generally said to have begun when Germany invaded which country in September 1939?
Poland
Germany invaded Poland on 1 September 1939; Britain and France declared war on Germany two days later, on 3 September.
Q 08Machu Picchu was built by which civilization?
Inca
Machu Picchu was built by the Inca around 1450, probably as an estate for the emperor Pachacuti, at about 2,430 metres in the Peruvian Andes.
Q 09Roughly how long did the Pony Express mail service actually operate?
18 months
The Pony Express ran only about 18 months, from April 1860 to October 1861, closing two days after the transcontinental telegraph was completed.
Q 10The Great Fire of London in 1666 started in a bakery on which street?
Pudding Lane
The fire began in Thomas Farriner's bakery on Pudding Lane shortly after midnight on 2 September 1666 and gutted the medieval City inside the Roman wall.
Q 11Which English king sealed Magna Carta at Runnymede in 1215?
John
King John sealed Magna Carta at Runnymede on 15 June 1215; his son Henry III reissued a trimmed version in 1216 to win baronial support.
Q 12Which city is the capital of Australia?
Canberra
Canberra was purpose-built as a compromise between Sydney and Melbourne; it sits inside the Australian Capital Territory and Parliament first met there in 1927.
Q 13Which is the world's largest island?
Greenland
Greenland, about 2.17 million km², is the largest island not counted as a continent; roughly 80% of it lies under an ice sheet.
Q 21The Sydney Opera House was designed by an architect from which country?
Denmark
Jørn Utzon of Denmark won the 1957 design competition but resigned in 1966, seven years before the Sydney Opera House opened in 1973.
Q 22Antarctica, despite its ice, is technically classified as what kind of environment?
A desert
Antarctica is a desert: it averages only about 150–170 mm of precipitation a year, almost all as snow, and its interior gets under 50 mm.
Q 23Which country is the largest in the world by land area?
Russia
Russia, at about 17.1 million km², is by far the largest country; it spans eleven time zones and borders fourteen countries.
Q 14Which is the deepest lake in the world?
Baikal
Lake Baikal in Siberia reaches 1,642 metres, the deepest of any lake, and holds more fresh water than all five North American Great Lakes combined.
Q 15Which is the smallest sovereign state in the world by both area and population?
Vatican City
Vatican City covers about 0.44 km² (44 hectares) with a population under 1,000, making it the smallest sovereign state by both area and population.
Q 16Mount Fuji stands on which of Japan's main islands?
Honshu
Mount Fuji, 3,776 metres, rises on Honshu, Japan's largest main island, about 100 km southwest of Tokyo.
Q 17What is the capital of Iceland?
Reykjavík
Reykjavík, the world's northernmost capital of a sovereign state, holds about a third of Iceland's population and hosted the 1986 Reagan–Gorbachev summit.
Q 18The Amazon River empties into which ocean?
Atlantic
The Amazon empties into the Atlantic near Belém, Brazil, discharging more water than any other river; before the Andes rose it probably drained west toward the Pacific.
Q 19Angkor Wat, the largest religious complex in the world, is in which country?
Cambodia
Angkor Wat stands near Siem Reap in Cambodia; built in the 12th century for King Suryavarman II, it appears on Cambodia's national flag.
Q 20Why does the Leaning Tower of Pisa lean?
It was built on soft, unstable ground
The tower was built on soft, unstable ground of clay and sand; it began tilting in 1178 during construction and leans about four degrees after 1990s stabilization work.
Q 24What is the chemical symbol for gold?
Au
Gold's symbol Au comes from the Latin aurum; the element's atomic number is 79.
Q 25Which element has the atomic number 2?
Helium
Helium has atomic number 2; it is named from the Greek helios (Sun) because it was first detected in the solar spectrum in 1868.
Q 26Which planet rotates almost on its side, with an extreme axial tilt?
Uranus
Uranus is tilted about 98 degrees, so it spins almost on its side; its rotation is retrograde and takes about 17 hours.
Q 27Which is the hardest natural material on the Mohs scale?
Diamond
Diamond rates 10, the top of the Mohs scale; its rigid tetrahedral carbon bonds pack atoms more densely than almost any other substance.
Q 28Roughly how fast does light travel in a vacuum?
300,000 km per second
Light travels about 300,000 km per second in a vacuum; the exact value, 299,792,458 metres per second, has defined the metre since 1983.
Q 29Marie Curie won Nobel Prizes in which two sciences?
Physics and Chemistry
Marie Curie won the 1903 Nobel Prize in Physics, shared with Pierre Curie and Henri Becquerel, and the 1911 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for discovering radium and polonium.
Q 30Charles Darwin's five-year voyage from 1831 to 1836 was aboard which ship?
Beagle
Darwin sailed on HMS Beagle under Captain Robert FitzRoy from December 1831 to October 1836; on the way he ate puma, iguana and giant tortoise.