Multiplication
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145 free Multiplication trivia questions with answers — science & nature quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
14 free multiplication trivia questions with answers. Ready to multiply your knowledge? Our multiplication trivia quiz covers everything from basic times tables to fascinating mathematical facts and the history of multiplication. Whether you're a math enthusiast or looking to brush up on your arithmetic skills, this quiz will put your multiplication mastery to the test.
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Q 01Which property of multiplication says 3 × 4 and 4 × 3 give the same product, no matter the order?
Commutative Property
Commutative Property: turn 3 rows of 4 dots on their side and they become 4 rows of 3, still 12 dots in all, which is why swapping the order can never change the answer.
Q 02Multiplying two negative numbers together always gives what kind of result?
A positive number
A positive number: follow the pattern 2 × −3 = −6, 1 × −3 = −3, 0 × −3 = 0, and the next step down, −1 × −3, has to climb to +3.
Q 03Which old trading word names a dozen dozens, or 144 of anything?
A gross
A gross is 144 items, a name taken from the Old French for 'large dozen'; a dozen gross, 1,728, is a great gross.
Q 04Which property says (2 × 3) × 4 and 2 × (3 × 4) give the same result, whatever the grouping?
Associative
Associative: because the grouping never matters, 7 × 25 × 4 can be done as 7 × 100, the regrouping trick behind many mental-arithmetic shortcuts.
Q 05Which property of multiplication lets a(b + c) be expanded to ab + ac?
Distributive Property
The Distributive Property spreads a factor across every term in the brackets; it's why 7 × 12 can be done as 7 × 10 plus 7 × 2.
Q 06Which mathematician is widely credited with introducing the '×' symbol for multiplication in 1631?
William Oughtred
William Oughtred, a Surrey rector who taught mathematics in his spare time, printed × in his 1631 Clavis Mathematicae; algebra later sidelined the cross because it is so easily mistaken for the letter x.
Q 07Which multiplication method, also called the Italian or gelosia method, writes the digits round a box of cells and sums its diagonals?
Lattice
Lattice multiplication writes each single-digit product in its own cell and leaves every carry for the diagonal sums at the end, so nobody has to multiply and carry at the same time.
Q 08Which civilization multiplied by 'doubling and halving' using powers of two?
Egyptian
Egyptian scribes needed no times table: they doubled one number again and again, then added up the doublings that matched the other number's powers of two.
Q 09Which number is the multiplicative identity, leaving any number multiplied by it unchanged?
1
Multiplying any number by 1 leaves it unchanged, which is why 1 is called the multiplicative identity; 0 plays the same role for addition.
Q 10Which result states every integer over 1 is prime or a unique product of primes, up to order?
The fundamental theorem of arithmetic
The fundamental theorem of arithmetic is one reason 1 is not counted as a prime: if it were, 12 could be 2 × 2 × 3 or 1 × 2 × 2 × 3, and no number would have just one factorisation.
Q 11Which easier operation do logarithm tables let you substitute for multi-digit multiplication?
Addition
Addition: since log(ab) = log a + log b, you add the two logarithms from the table and look up the antilog to get the product; division becomes subtraction.
Q 12Which Scottish mathematician built numbered calculating rods and named the technique rabdology?
John Napier
John Napier engraved a times table on the faces of each rod, so lining up the rods for 4, 2 and 5 lets you read off 425 × 7 with only a few small sums; the sets became known as Napier's bones.
Q 13Which hand-operated calculator uses logarithmic scales to multiply and divide?
The slide rule
Q 21If two numbers multiply together to make zero, what must be true of them?
At least one is zero
At least one is zero: this zero-product property is what lets (x − 5)(x − 3) = 0 be split into two easy cases, x = 5 or x = 3.
Q 22Two numbers that multiply to make exactly 1, such as 4 and ¼, are called what?
Reciprocals
Reciprocals: flip a fraction to find its partner, which is why dividing by ½ gives the same answer as multiplying by 2.
Q 23Multiplying a number by itself and then by itself again, as in 4 × 4 × 4, gives its what?
Cube
Cube: 4 × 4 × 4 = 64 counts the unit blocks in a cube four blocks long, wide and high, which is where the name comes from.
The slide rule, born in the 17th century, still flew with the Apollo crews, yet once pocket calculators became cheap in the mid-1970s it was soon obsolete.
Q 14The oldest known multiplication tables, from about 4,000 years ago, were used by which civilization?
The Babylonians
The Babylonians pressed their tables into clay some 4,000 years ago, but in base 60 rather than base 10, the same way of counting that still gives us 60 minutes in an hour.
Q 15The world's earliest known decimal multiplication table, made in China around 305 BC, was written on what?
Bamboo slips
Bamboo slips: the 21 strips reached Tsinghua University in 2008 muddy, mouldy and mixed in with nearly 2,500 others, and historians had to piece the table together like a jigsaw.
Q 16In French, Italian and Russian, the multiplication table is named after which Greek?
Pythagoras
Pythagoras: French 'table de Pythagore' and Italian 'tavola pitagorica' keep his name, though the credit is tradition rather than proven fact.
Q 17Which word means to multiply something by four?
Quadruple
Quadruple comes from the Latin for 'fourfold', and the same 'fold' is hidden inside 'multiply' itself, which goes back to the Latin multiplex, 'many-fold'.
Q 18Which property says the product of any two integers is itself an integer?
Closure
Closure: the integers are closed under multiplication, so 7 × (−3) = −21 stays an integer, whereas they are not closed under division, since 7 ÷ 3 is not.
Q 19England's national curriculum expects pupils to know their times tables up to which fact by the end of Year 4?
12 × 12
12 × 12: Year 4 pupils in England's state schools sit an on-screen check of 25 timed questions to show they can recall the tables up to 12.
Q 20The Chinese eighty-one-sentence rhyme for learning products was historically known by what name?
The nine-nine table
The nine-nine table: early versions are said to have opened with 'nine nines beget eighty-one' and counted down from there, which gave the rhyme its name; Chinese pupils still learn it by heart.
Q 24Which word describes a whole number, such as 12, that can be made by multiplying two smaller whole numbers?
Composite
Composite: 12 counters can be laid out as 3 rows of 4, while a prime such as 13 only ever makes one long line.
Q 25Which operation asks what number, multiplied by itself, gives 81?
Square root
Square root: 81 gives a tidy 9, but 2 has no such answer, since its square root is a decimal that never ends or repeats and so can't be written as a fraction.
Q 26Who, in 1698, proposed a middle dot for multiplication because × looked too much like x?
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz told Johann Bernoulli in a 1698 letter that × was too easily confused with x; the dot he preferred is still the usual multiplication sign in German mathematics.
Q 27In computer programming, which symbol is the usual notation for multiplication?
The asterisk
The asterisk became the stand-in because early computer character sets such as ASCII had no × sign, and it has kept its place on the numeric keypad ever since.
Q 28In a screen size such as 1920 × 1080, the multiplication sign is read aloud as which word?
By
By: the sign is read 'times' in a sum but 'by' in a size, though multiplying anyway gives the screen's pixel count, 1920 × 1080 = 2,073,600.
Q 29In a famous legend, wheat grains doubled on each square of which board add up to more than the world grows?
A chessboard
A chessboard: one grain doubled across 64 squares comes to more than 18 quintillion grains, far more wheat than the whole world harvests in a year.
Q 30Rules for multiplying with zero and negative 'debts' were set out in 628 AD in which country?
India
India: Brahmagupta's Brahmasphutasiddhanta treated zero as a number like any other, stating flatly that a number multiplied by zero becomes zero.