Nevada Trivia
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100 free Nevada trivia questions with answers — geography quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
44 free Nevada trivia questions with answers. Nevada is more than the Strip. It became a state with too few people to qualify, legalised gambling eight days after the Hoover Dam contract was signed, hosted more nuclear detonations than anywhere else in America, and hid an airbase the government would not admit existed until 2013. This quiz runs 100 questions across the whole state: the Spanish name and Battle Born nickname, the Comstock Lode and Mark Twain, Las Vegas from railroad auction to Golden Knights, Hoover Dam and Lake Tahoe, Area 51 and the Extraterrestrial Highway, Burning Man, mining, the state symbols and the people who make up modern Nevada. It starts with warm-ups any visitor will get and works up to questions for people who grew up there. Every answer has been checked against reference sources, shown under each question once you answer, so it works for a Nevada Day classroom, a Vegas trip or a US geography round at pub trivia.
30 of 100 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01What is the capital of Nevada?
Carson City
Carson City. Abraham Curry and his partners laid out the town in 1858, and he set aside ten acres for a capitol before Nevada was even a territory.
Q 02Nevada's 1860s mining boom earned it which nickname?
The Silver State
The Silver State. Silver struck near Virginia City in 1859 drew so many fortune-seekers that Nevada became its own territory just two years later.
Q 03What does the name 'Nevada' mean in Spanish?
Snowy
Snowy. The name points to snow-capped mountains, a surprising label for the driest state in the country.
Q 04Nevada was rushed into the Union just before the 1864 election to help re-elect which president?
Abraham Lincoln
Abraham Lincoln. Republican-leaning Nevada was hurried in partly for its electoral votes, yet Lincoln won so comfortably that he never needed the new state's support.
Q 05Which state, admitted in 1863, was the only one besides Nevada to join the Union during the Civil War?
West Virginia
West Virginia. Its western counties refused to follow Virginia out of the Union in 1861 and won admission as a separate state two years later.
Q 06Since 2000, on which day has Nevada observed Nevada Day, the state holiday marking its admission?
The last Friday in October
The last Friday in October. Lawmakers moved the observance in 2000 to guarantee a three-day weekend, although by law Nevada Day itself is still October 31.
Q 07Which 1859 discovery led to Nevada Territory being carved out of Utah Territory?
The Comstock Lode
The Comstock Lode. The rush to its ore under Virginia City packed the region with miners, and the fortunes it made helped build San Francisco as well as Nevada.
Q 08Which reservoir behind Hoover Dam is the largest in the United States by capacity?
Lake Mead
Lake Mead. When full it can hold two years of the Colorado River's entire flow, and as it filled in 1938 it drowned the town of St. Thomas, whose ruins drought has since exposed.
Q 09Which famous writer lived in Nevada during the mining boom and described it in Roughing It?
Mark Twain
Mark Twain. As Samuel Clemens he failed as a prospector, took a reporting job at Virginia City's Territorial Enterprise, and first signed the name Mark Twain there in 1863.
Q 10In 1931 Nevada cut its residency rule to six weeks for what?
Divorce
Divorce. Most states made it far harder, so out-of-staters flocked in to sit out the six weeks, and Reno became known as the 'Divorce Capital of the World'.
Q 11Nevada is the only US state where what is legal, and then only in some rural counties?
Prostitution
Prostitution. State law lets only counties of under 700,000 people license brothels, which rules out Las Vegas, and they survive in just a handful of rural counties.
Q 12Which landowner holds more than 80% of Nevada?
The federal government
The federal government. Most of it is not parks or bases but open public land run by the Bureau of Land Management, which alone oversees about two-thirds of the state.
Q 13Most of Nevada lies in which vast region of the American West?
The Great Basin
Q 21Which president dedicated Hoover Dam in September 1935?
Franklin D. Roosevelt
Franklin D. Roosevelt. His administration had stopped using Hoover's name for the dam, and Congress passed a law in 1947 to restore it.
Q 22Which mobster opened the Flamingo hotel-casino on the Las Vegas Strip in 1946?
Bugsy Siegel
Bugsy Siegel. He opened the casino before the hotel was finished and soon had to close it for a time; his murder six months later made headlines that put Las Vegas on the map.
Q 23Which Nevada town was purpose-built to house Hoover Dam's construction workers?
Boulder City
Boulder City. Thousands of Depression job-seekers had flooded Las Vegas and camped in the desert, and those who were hired moved into a whole new town built for them.
The Great Basin. The name is misleading: it is really many small basins, and the rain and snow that fall in them never reach the sea.
Q 14Nearly three-quarters of Nevadans live in which county, home to Las Vegas?
Clark
Clark County. It is named for William A. Clark, the Montana senator whose 1905 land auction gave birth to Las Vegas.
Q 15Most of the Las Vegas Strip lies outside the city limits, in which unincorporated town?
Paradise
Paradise. Casino bosses had the area declared a town in 1950 so that the city of Las Vegas could not annex the Strip and tax it.
Q 16What does 'Las Vegas' mean in Spanish?
The meadows
The meadows. Traders on the trail to Los Angeles in 1829 found spring-fed grassland in the middle of the desert, and the name stuck.
Q 17Las Vegas was founded in 1905 when lots were auctioned beside a new what?
Railroad
A railroad. The new line between Salt Lake City and Los Angeles needed a desert stop to service its trains, so a townsite was laid out beside the tracks and auctioned off.
Q 18Which downtown Las Vegas hotel-casino opened in 1906 as the Hotel Nevada?
The Golden Gate
The Golden Gate. It opened as the Hotel Nevada, and after gambling became legal again in 1931 it took the name Sal Sagev, the city's name spelled backwards.
Q 19Downtown Las Vegas's famous casino street is named after which explorer?
John C. Frémont
John C. Frémont. He camped at Las Vegas Springs on an 1844 expedition, and his published account drew later travellers to the valley.
Q 20The Bureau of Reclamation says Hoover Dam's concrete could pave a highway between which two cities?
San Francisco and New York
San Francisco and New York. Poured in one go, that much concrete would have taken 125 years to cool, so the builders cast it in blocks chilled by pipes of cold water.
Q 24Which lake is the only one in the United States deeper than Lake Tahoe?
Crater
Crater Lake. It fills the shell of Oregon's Mount Mazama, a volcano that collapsed about 7,700 years ago, and is fed only by rain and snow.
Q 25Nevada shares Lake Tahoe with which other state, which holds about two-thirds of the lake?
California
California. The state line runs straight through the water, and since 1969 the two states have run a joint agency to control building around the lake.
Q 26In the 1950s, Las Vegas businesses threw all-night 'dawn parties' so that guests could watch what, 65 miles away?
Atomic bomb tests
Atomic bomb tests. The flash lit the night sky and the mushroom clouds became a tourist draw, until a 1963 treaty banned the above-ground blasts.
Q 27In 1987 Congress singled out which Nevada ridge as the only site to study for burying America's nuclear waste?
Yucca Mountain
Yucca Mountain. Nevadans nicknamed the law the 'Screw Nevada Bill' and the state has fought the plan ever since, so no waste has ever been stored there.
Q 28Area 51's official names include Homey Airport and that of which dry lake bed?
Groom Lake
Groom Lake. The CIA did not publicly acknowledge the base until 2013, in papers released after an eight-year freedom-of-information request.
Q 29Area 51 was set up in 1955 to flight-test which spy plane?
The U-2
The U-2. The CIA and the Air Force took over the remote site in 1955 so that the high-flying jet could be tested far from prying eyes.
Q 30Nevada State Route 375, near Area 51, carries which official nickname?
The Extraterrestrial Highway
The Extraterrestrial Highway. Nevada made the name official in 1996, and the governor unveiled its signs in tiny Rachel alongside stars of the film Independence Day.