Nauru Trivia
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49 free Nauru trivia questions with answers — geography quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Nauru is a 21-square-kilometre speck of coral just south of the equator, the third-smallest country on Earth and the smallest republic, with no official capital, no rivers and no armed forces. For most of the 20th century it was one of the richest places per head in the world thanks to phosphate, and then one of the poorest when the phosphate ran out and the trust fund evaporated. This quiz covers that arc: the twelve clans and Buada Lagoon, John Fearn's 'Pleasant Island', the civil war fought with sailors' guns, German annexation in 1888, the doorstop in a Sydney office that turned out to be phosphate, Australia's mandate, the Japanese deportations to Chuuk, the Curtis Island resettlement plan, Hammer DeRoburt and independence on 31 January 1968. Modern Nauru is here too: the Australian detention centre that supplies a third of GDP, the switches between Taiwan and Beijing, recognition of Abkhazia, the golden-passport plan to move the population uphill, the world's highest obesity, diabetes and smoking rates, weightlifting, Australian rules football and the flag whose gold stripe is the equator. Easy questions ask which ocean; hard ones want the height of Command Ridge and the name of the airline whose only jet was repossessed. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's articles on Nauru, its flag, Yaren, Hammer DeRoburt, phosphate mining, the Regional Processing Centre and Nauru at the Olympics, and each question carries the sentence that supports it.
30 of 49 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Nauru lies in which subregion of Oceania?
Micronesia
Micronesia. Nauru's long isolation there is believed to explain why its language doesn't clearly resemble any other in the Pacific.
Q 02Besides Vatican City, which country is smaller than Nauru by area?
Monaco
Monaco. Both it and Vatican City are in Europe, which makes Nauru the smallest country outside it, yet phosphate once made its people among the richest on Earth.
Q 03In 2025, roughly how many people lived on Nauru?
12,000
About 12,000. Most of them live on the narrow coastal rim, around an interior that phosphate mining left uninhabitable.
Q 04Nauru's squandered mining wealth is often cited as a classic example of what?
The resource curse
The resource curse. When the phosphate ran out, so did the money: the national bank went broke, and in 2004 Australian officials were brought in to run the state's finances.
Q 05What is Nauru's name in the Nauruan language, adopted as the country's official name in 2026?
Naoero
Naoero, pronounced 'Now-ero'. The government said 'Nauru' took hold only because foreign tongues couldn't pronounce the original, and it dropped a planned referendum to make the switch.
Q 06What did British captain John Fearn call Nauru when he sighted it in 1798?
Pleasant Island
Pleasant Island. Hundreds of islanders canoed out to greet his ship, and the welcome so charmed Fearn that the name lasted 90 years, though he never let his crew land.
Q 07Nauruans traditionally took their clan from which relative?
Their mother
Their mother. There were twelve of these matrilineal clans, each with its own chief, which is why the star on Nauru's flag has twelve points.
Q 08Traditional Nauruans raised which fish in Buada Lagoon after acclimatising them to fresh water?
Milkfish
Milkfish. Islanders caught the young fish, called ibija, in the shallows along the shore and carried them inland to fatten in the lagoon as a living larder.
Q 09Nauru's ten-year civil war of 1878 was fought mainly with which weapons, traded from visiting ships for food?
Firearms
Firearms. Deserters and beachcombers brought them ashore, and the clan feuds they armed cut the island's population by more than a third before colonial annexation ended the fighting.
Q 10Which empire annexed Nauru in 1888?
Germany
Germany. Its marines marched around the island, rounded up all twelve chiefs and held them under house arrest until the islanders gave in.
Q 11The phosphate dug out of Nauru for a century was sold abroad mainly as what?
Fertiliser
Fertiliser. It was sold at below-market rates to farmers in Australia and New Zealand, so the island's soil enriched their pastures while Nauruans saw only a sliver of the profits.
Q 12A lump of rock propping open an office door in which city led Albert Ellis to Nauru's phosphate?
Sydney
Sydney. Told the lump was petrified wood, Ellis tested it anyway and found high-grade phosphate ore, the start of a century of mining.
Q 13Nauru landed on an international money-laundering blacklist after selling cheap licences for what in the 1990s?
Offshore banks
Offshore banks. Their founders never had to visit the island, let alone open a branch, yet Russia's central bank reckoned that some US$70 billion passed through them in 1998 alone.
Q 21Which ridge, still dotted with rusting Japanese guns from World War II, is Nauru's highest point?
Command Ridge
Command Ridge. It rises no more than about 70 metres above the sea; Japanese forces kept watch from it during the war and left a communications bunker with their writing on its walls.
Q 22In 1989 Nauru took Australia to which court over the damage phosphate mining had done?
The International Court of Justice
The International Court of Justice. Australia settled out of court in 1993, after the judges had refused to throw the case out, agreeing to pay towards restoring the mined-out land, and Britain and New Zealand later chipped in.
Q 23What was repossessed from Air Nauru in December 2005?
Q 14Under the 1919 Nauru Island Agreement, mining was handled by which intergovernmental body?
The British Phosphate Commission
The British Phosphate Commission, a joint venture of Britain, Australia and New Zealand, mined the island until newly independent Nauru bought out its assets and took control in 1970.
Q 15During World War II, Japan deported 1,200 Nauruans to work as labourers where?
The Chuuk Islands
The Chuuk Islands, then known as Truk. About two-thirds of all Nauruans were shipped there, and hundreds died of starvation and bombing before the war ended.
Q 16In 1963 Canberra offered to resettle every Nauruan on Curtis Island, off the coast of which Australian state?
Queensland
Queensland. Nauruans refused because the offer came with Australian citizenship but not sovereignty over the island, and they chose independence at home instead.
Q 17Who was Nauru's first president?
Hammer DeRoburt
Hammer DeRoburt. A schoolteacher who survived wartime deportation, he led the independence talks and then held the presidency for most of the next two decades.
Q 18Nauru has no official capital, but which district houses parliament and is usually listed as one?
Yaren
Yaren. Its airstrip, now the country's only airport, was laid by Japanese occupiers in World War II and drew American bombing for two years.
Q 19Most members of Nauru's 19-seat parliament sit as what?
Independents
Independents. With no real party system, governments rest on family ties and shifting alliances, which is why Nauru's presidents are so often toppled by no-confidence votes.
Q 20Mining stripped four-fifths of Nauru down to a forest of jagged pinnacles made of which rock?
Limestone
Limestone. The pinnacles are the island's bedrock, left standing when miners dug the phosphate out from between them, and nothing can be built or grown among them.
Its only Boeing 737
Its only Boeing 737. A US bank seized the jet on the ground in Melbourne over unpaid loans, leaving Nauru with no air service until a replacement arrived the following year.
Q 24What currency does Nauru use?
The Australian dollar
The Australian dollar. It is a holdover from colonial days: Australian money was legal tender while Canberra ran the island, and independent Nauru simply kept it.
Q 25Nauru's detention centre was opened in 2001 as part of which Australian government policy?
The Pacific Solution
The Pacific Solution. It sent people who arrived by boat to camps on Nauru and in Papua New Guinea instead of the mainland; scrapped in 2008, it was revived four years later.
Q 26In the mid-1970s Nauru's income per head was reported as second in the world only to which oil state's?
Saudi Arabia
Saudi Arabia. Phosphate money gave every Nauruan free schooling and health care with no income tax to pay, until the ore, and then the money, ran out.
Q 27Nauru's 2001 detention arrangement grew out of which incident involving a Norwegian ship?
The Tampa affair
The Tampa affair. The freighter had rescued more than 400 asylum seekers from a sinking boat; Canberra refused it entry, sent troops aboard, then paid Nauru to take the passengers.
Q 28In 2009 Nauru became the fourth country to recognise which two breakaway regions of Georgia?
Abkhazia and South Ossetia
Abkhazia and South Ossetia. Russia was reported to have promised Nauru about US$50 million in aid for the move, which the island reversed in July 2026.
Q 29Which government did Nauru drop in 2002, return to in 2005 and drop again in 2024?
Taiwan
Taiwan. Nauru has won aid from both Taipei and Beijing by switching between them, and each change of sides has brought the charge that its loyalty was bought.
Q 30In 2025 Nauru began selling what to fund moving 90% of its people to higher ground?
Golden passports
Golden passports. They cost at least US$105,000 each, though an earlier citizenship sale ended in scandal when al-Qaida suspects were caught carrying Nauruan passports.