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
East Germany announced on the evening of 9 November that its citizens could cross freely, and crowds took the checkpoints that night.
Q 02Julius Caesar was assassinated on the Ides of March in which year?
44 BC
The conspirators were led by Brutus and Cassius, and Caesar was due to leave for a Parthian campaign three days later.
Q 03Napoleon's final defeat in June 1815 came at which battle?
Waterloo
A Seventh Coalition, with Wellington and Blücher, ended his Hundred Days comeback and sent him to exile on Saint Helena.
Q 04The storming of the Bastille, the flashpoint of the French Revolution, happened in which year?
1789
The fortress was rumoured to hold many prisoners but actually held just seven, including four forgers.
Q 05Cleopatra was the last active ruler of which Egyptian dynasty?
Ptolemaic
The dynasty was founded by Ptolemy I, a Macedonian Greek general who served under Alexander the Great, and Cleopatra was the only one of them known to learn Egyptian.
Q 06Archduke Franz Ferdinand, whose 1914 assassination triggered World War I, was shot in which city?
Sarajevo
He was visiting the capital of Bosnia and Herzegovina, which Austria-Hungary had annexed only six years earlier.
Q 07World War II is generally said to have begun when Germany invaded which country in September 1939?
Poland
Britain and France declared war on Germany two days after the invasion began.
Q 08Machu Picchu was built by which civilization?
Inca
The citadel sits at about 2,430 metres in the Peruvian Andes and is thought to have been an estate of the emperor Pachacuti.
Q 09Roughly how long did the Pony Express mail service actually operate?
18 months
It cut coast-to-coast delivery to about 10 days but went bankrupt once the transcontinental telegraph was completed.
Q 10The Great Fire of London in 1666 started in a bakery on which street?
Pudding Lane
The blaze began shortly after midnight on 2 September and gutted the medieval City inside the old Roman wall.
Q 11Which English king sealed Magna Carta at Runnymede in 1215?
John
His son Henry III reissued a trimmed-down version the following year in a bid for baronial support.
Q 12Which city is the capital of Australia?
Canberra
The purpose-built capital sits inside its own territory, the ACT, and its suburbs run right up to the New South Wales border.
Q 13Which is the world's largest island?
Greenland
It lies between the Arctic and Atlantic oceans and is still mostly covered by an ice sheet.
Q 14Which is the deepest lake in the world?
Q 21The Sydney Opera House was designed by an architect from which country?
Denmark
Jørn Utzon won an international competition in 1957 but resigned before the building opened in 1973.
Q 22Antarctica, despite its ice, is technically classified as what kind of environment?
A desert
The continent receives on average the equivalent of only about 150 mm of water a year, mostly as snow.
Q 23Which country is the largest in the world by land area?
Russia
It spans eleven time zones and shares land borders with fourteen countries.
What is the chemical symbol for gold?
Baikal
Its maximum depth of 1,642 metres means it holds more fresh water than all the North American Great Lakes combined.
Q 15Which is the smallest sovereign state in the world by both area and population?
Vatican City
It covers just 44 hectares and had a population of about 882 in 2024.
Q 16Mount Fuji stands on which of Japan's main islands?
Honshu
The active stratovolcano rises 3,776 metres near the Pacific coast, just southwest of Tokyo.
Q 17What is the capital of Iceland?
Reykjavík
It is home to about 35% of the country's roughly 395,000 people, and hosted the 1986 Reagan–Gorbachev summit.
Q 18The Amazon River empties into which ocean?
Atlantic
Before the Andes rose, the river is thought to have drained westward toward the Pacific instead.
Q 19Angkor Wat, the largest religious complex in the world, is in which country?
Cambodia
The temple complex is such a national symbol that it appears on the country's flag.
Q 20Why does the Leaning Tower of Pisa lean?
It was built on soft, unstable ground
The lean began during construction in the 12th century and today stands at nearly four degrees.
Au
The symbol comes from the Latin word aurum; the element's atomic number is 79.
Q 25Which element has the atomic number 2?
Helium
Its name comes from the Greek word for the Sun, because it was first detected in the solar spectrum.
Q 26Which planet rotates almost on its side, with an extreme axial tilt?
Uranus
Its rotation is also retrograde, and it takes about 17 hours to spin once.
Q 27Which is the hardest natural material on the Mohs scale?
Diamond
Its rigid tetrahedral bonds give it more atoms per unit volume than any other known substance.
Q 28Roughly how fast does light travel in a vacuum?
300,000 km per second
The exact figure, 299,792,458 metres per second, is now used to define the metre itself.
Q 29Marie Curie remains the only person to win Nobel Prizes in which two sciences?
Physics and Chemistry
She was the first person to win two Nobels, and only Linus Pauling has since matched her feat of winning in two different fields.
Q 30Charles Darwin's five-year voyage from 1831 to 1836 was aboard which ship?
Beagle
During the voyage he ate puma, iguana and giant tortoise, and accidentally ate part of a rhea he meant to study.