Paper Towns
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50 free Paper Towns trivia questions with answers — literature quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Paper Towns is John Green's 2008 novel about Quentin Jacobsen, a cautious high-schooler, and Margo Roth Spiegelman, the neighbour he has adored from a distance since childhood. One spring night she climbs through his window, recruits him for an elaborate round of revenge, and by morning has vanished, leaving a trail of clues that only he seems meant to follow. This quiz follows the book from the prologue to the final farewell: the pranks, the poem and the poster, the long drive with Ben, Radar and Lacey, and the question of who Margo really is. It also covers the real mapmaking oddity behind the title, John Green's career and awards, and the 2015 film, including its cast and the places where it departs from the novel. It suits readers who have just finished the book, students revising it for class, book clubs, and fans of the film who want to see how much of the original they remember. Every answer comes with a short explanation, and the questions start gently before reaching the details only careful readers catch.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01In Paper Towns, Radar avoids bringing a date home because his parents own the world's largest collection of what?
Black Santas
Black Santas cover every surface of the Lincoln house, and the craze has a payoff: the parents fly off to buy a late collector's hoard, leaving the place free for a party.
Q 02Which Florida attraction do Margo and Quentin sneak into through a drainage ditch to end their night in Paper Towns?
SeaWorld
SeaWorld proved an anticlimax, its tanks empty after dark, and the 2015 film dropped the scene once the documentary Blackfish had criticised keeping orcas there.
Q 03Which Catskills hamlet, invented by mapmakers, turns out to be Margo's hiding place in Paper Towns?
Agloe
Agloe began as a made-up dot at a dirt-road junction, yet a real business later took the name, so the invented place ended up existing after all.
Q 04Which fish does Margo plant in a drawer, a house and a car on her night of revenge in Paper Towns?
Catfish
Catfish, three of them, went on Margo's supermarket list beside a dozen tulips, and each fish was delivered with a farewell note to a friend or an ex.
Q 05Margo once left alphabet soup with only four different letters as a clue in Paper Towns; which state had she run to?
Mississippi
Mississippi is spelled with just M, I, S and P, yet nobody cracked it, and Margo's father complained it was too big a state to search on so little.
Q 06Which animals, standing in the highway at 2:40 a.m., almost end the friends' overnight drive in Paper Towns?
Cows
Cows, two of them, filled the lane as Quentin froze; Ben grabbed the wheel and spun the car onto the shoulder, a move that later earned it the name the Dreidel.
Q 07In Paper Towns, Margo and Quentin take off the sleeping bully Chuck Parson's right eyebrow using which product?
Hair-removal cream
Hair-removal cream went on while Chuck slept, and wiping it away took the whole eyebrow with it; the target was chosen for Quentin's sake, payback for a prank in a middle-school dance class.
Q 08Which British model played Margo Roth Spiegelman in the 2015 film of Paper Towns, winning two Teen Choice Awards?
Cara Delevingne
Cara Delevingne had twice been named Model of the Year at the British Fashion Awards, and her acting career had begun with a minor part in the 2012 film Anna Karenina.
Q 09Which graduation present do Quentin's parents give him in Paper Towns on the morning he learns where Margo is?
A minivan
A minivan was not what Quentin had hoped for: his parents wrongly assumed he loved driving his mother's, but that same day it was carrying four friends out of Florida.
Q 10What do Ben and Radar have on under their graduation robes when the dash to find Margo begins in Paper Towns?
No clothes at all
No clothes at all, thanks to a pact made at a party to go bare beneath the robes; when the friends skipped the ceremony, outfits had to be bought at the first fuel stop.
Q 11Which Florida hometown of author John Green provides the suburban setting for Paper Towns?
Orlando
Orlando is where John Green went to school, and its sprawl of near-identical subdivisions gave him the paper-thin suburbia Margo rails against from a downtown tower.
Q 12A mapmaker's paper town, like the one where Margo hides in Paper Towns, is a fake place added as what?
A copyright trap
A copyright trap catches plagiarists: if the invented place turns up on a rival's map, the rival must have copied it rather than surveyed the land.
Q 13Which fictional user-edited reference site does Radar keep updating in Paper Towns, even coding a search tool for it?
Omnictionary
Q 21Reviewers said the central mystery of Paper Towns echoed which earlier John Green novel, his boarding-school debut?
Looking for Alaska
Looking for Alaska, his 2005 debut, drew on Green's own boarding-school years in Alabama and won the Printz Award the year after it appeared.
Q 22Which former lead of Nickelodeon's The Naked Brothers Band plays Quentin in the 2015 film of Paper Towns?
Nat Wolff
Nat Wolff's casting was announced by John Green on Twitter in March 2014, and he and his brother Alex also contributed a song to the soundtrack.
Q 23Scott Neustadter and Michael H. Weber wrote the Paper Towns screenplay after adapting which other John Green novel?
Omnictionary is where the hunt is solved: Radar's tool lists the opening lines of articles on a region, and a comment under one entry gives Margo away.
Q 14Margo leaves behind a highlighted copy of Leaves of Grass in Paper Towns; which American poet wrote it?
Walt Whitman
Walt Whitman wrote the long poem Song of Myself that Margo marked up, and Quentin's teacher insists it celebrates human connection rather than death.
Q 15A poster of which folk singer, hung on Margo's window shade, is the first clue Quentin spots in Paper Towns?
Woody Guthrie
Woody Guthrie appears holding the guitar he famously lettered with an anti-fascist message, and the poster points to an album of covers in Margo's room with one track circled.
Q 16Two highlighted lines of verse in Paper Towns lead Quentin to an address clue after he does what to his door?
Unscrewing its hinges
Unscrewing its hinges exposed a sliver of newspaper with an address in Margo's handwriting; the boys had already tried her door and come away empty-handed.
Q 17The address Margo hides for Quentin in Paper Towns leads him and his friends to what kind of place?
An abandoned strip mall
An abandoned strip mall is what they find, its office calendars frozen in February 1986; Margo later reveals she spent years of free time there and knew it as the Osprey.
Q 18Which quirk of Margo's writing lets Quentin recognise her anonymous online comment near the end of Paper Towns?
Randomly scattered capitals
Randomly scattered capitals were Margo's signature: she told Quentin the usual rules were unfair to words in the middle, and he first saw the habit on a shopping list.
Q 19When the friends finally track Margo down at the end of Paper Towns, where do they find her living?
In an old barn
In an old barn beside a dirt lane, where Margo sat writing in her notebook; she asked for five minutes to finish before greeting anyone.
Q 20Where does Margo tell Quentin she is heading next when the two part at the end of Paper Towns?
New York City
New York City had long been Margo's idea of the one American place worth living in, and she asks Quentin to come along; he chooses to go home instead.
The Fault in Our Stars
The Fault in Our Stars came out a year earlier from the same producers, and the studio at one point scheduled this follow-up for the day before that hit's first anniversary.
Q 24In Paper Towns, which man do nine-year-old Margo and Quentin find dead beneath an oak tree in the prologue?
Robert Joyner
Robert Joyner had taken his own life over a divorce, as Margo learned by quizzing a neighbour that same day, and her image of strings breaking inside him recurs throughout the book.
Q 25Paper Towns is split into three parts named after metaphors: The Strings, The Grass and which other?
The Vessel
The Vessel is Quentin's own image, offered at the end: people begin whole and crack over time, and the cracks are where others finally see in.
Q 26Quentin's mother and father in Paper Towns share which profession, one that colours their advice over dinner?
Therapists
Therapists both, they tell Quentin that people cannot easily see how they appear to others, a remark that reshapes how he pictures Margo.
Q 27Quentin and Ben gave Marcus Lincoln the nickname Radar in Paper Towns after a character in which TV series?
M*A*S*H
M*A*S*H gave the group's brains his name, and on the drive he lives up to it, planning each fuel stop down to a six-minute limit.
Q 28The final part of Paper Towns, covering the long drive, labels its sections not with chapter numbers but with what?
Hours
Hours tick by one per section, twenty-one in all, as the friends race a noon deadline; the first two parts use ordinary numbered chapters.
Q 29What does Quentin's mother call the unfinished, empty housing developments that he searches one by one in Paper Towns?
Pseudovisions
Pseudovisions are developments dropped before completion, and Quentin pins five of them on a wall map, dreading what he might find at each.
Q 30The police officer handling Margo's case in Paper Towns compares her to which object straining against its strings?
A balloon
A balloon that has finally broken free is how Otis Warren sees Margo, and he warns Quentin that once such a string is cut, nobody can tie it back.