Papua New Guinea Trivia
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50 free Papua New Guinea trivia questions with answers — geography quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
Forty-four questions on Papua New Guinea, the most linguistically diverse country on Earth. Geography covers Port Moresby, Mount Wilhelm, the Sepik and Fly rivers, the Torres Strait, Rabaul's volcanoes and a country that runs two time zones and sits on the Ring of Fire. History runs from the 9,000-year-old drainage ditches at Kuk, through Portuguese and Spanish naming, German and British partition, the Kokoda Track, Australian rule and 1975 independence under Michael Somare, to the Bougainville war, the Sandline affair and the 2019 independence referendum. The rest is the culture people actually recognise: 840 languages, Tok Pisin and Hiri Motu, the kina named for a pearl shell, the bird-of-paradise on the flag, sing-sings, the wantok system, the Kula ring, sweet potato in the highlands and rugby league's Kumuls. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's articles on the country, its regions, languages and history, and the sentence that establishes it is quoted under each explanation. Suits a pub quiz, a geography classroom or anyone who has ever tried to count the languages of Melanesia.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Papua New Guinea shares its only land border with which country?
Indonesia
Indonesia. The Dutch claimed the western half of New Guinea in 1828 and it later passed to Indonesia, which is why a single border now runs down the middle of the island.
Q 02What is the capital of Papua New Guinea?
Port Moresby
Port Moresby. Royal Navy captain John Moresby charted the harbour in 1873 and named it after his father, an admiral; in the Second World War it was the Allied stronghold that the enemy never managed to capture.
Q 03Papua New Guinea has roughly how many known spoken languages, more than any other country?
840
840. Rough terrain kept small communities apart for thousands of years, so each kept its own tongue, and most of the roughly 840 languages have only a few hundred to a few thousand speakers.
Q 04Which English-based creole is the most widely used language in Papua New Guinea?
Tok Pisin
Tok Pisin. It grew up on colonial plantations, where workers from many language groups needed a common tongue, and many town children now learn it as their first language.
Q 05Which simplified form of a southern coastal language is an official language of Papua New Guinea?
Hiri Motu
Hiri Motu. It spread across the south because the colonial police force adopted it, earning it the nickname Police Motu, before it was renamed in the 1970s.
Q 06The 'Guinea' in New Guinea was borrowed by a 16th-century Spanish navigator from a coast on which continent?
Africa
Africa. Spanish navigator Yñigo Ortiz de Retez, coasting the island in the 1540s, named it after West Africa's Guinea coast because, by most accounts, the islanders reminded him of the people there.
Q 07In 1884 eastern New Guinea was split between the British in the south and which power in the north?
Germany
Germany took the north-east as Kaiser-Wilhelmsland in 1884 while Britain claimed the south; Australia seized the German territory in 1914 and later ran it under a League of Nations mandate.
Q 08Which royal represented the Queen at Papua New Guinea's independence celebrations in 1975?
Prince Charles
Prince Charles. He watched the Australian flag being lowered for the last time on the eve of independence, and 50 years on, as king, he sent a message that was broadcast at the anniversary celebrations.
Q 09Who was Papua New Guinea's first prime minister, known as the 'father of the nation'?
Michael Somare
Michael Somare. Chief minister before independence, he was voted out as prime minister in 1980 yet won the job back twice, serving about 17 years in all.
Q 10Which mountain, at 4,509 metres, is the highest point in Papua New Guinea?
Mount Wilhelm
Mount Wilhelm. Before dawn on 22 May 1944 a US reconnaissance bomber flew into the mountain at about 4,000 metres, and pieces of the wreck can still be seen on its slopes.
Q 11Which river, the longest on the island of New Guinea, winds across the northern lowlands to the Bismarck Sea?
The Sepik
The Sepik. It loops for about 1,100 km through a vast swampy basin, and in some villages on its banks boys are initiated with rows of cuts that heal to look like a crocodile's scales.
Q 12The shallow waterway separating Papua New Guinea from Australia's Cape York Peninsula is called what?
Torres Strait
Torres Strait. Spanish navigator Luis Váez de Torres picked his way through its reefs and shoals in 1606, and the channel, about 150 km wide, is still hazardous for ships today.
Q 13Which region of Papua New Guinea keeps its clocks one hour ahead of the rest of the country?
Bougainville
Q 21The Kumuls are Papua New Guinea's team in which sport, the country's national game?
Rugby league
Rugby league. Australian soldiers stationed there around the Second World War spread the game, and it took such a hold that Papua New Guinea is the only country to count it as the national sport.
Q 22At Kuk Swamp, Papua New Guinea's first World Heritage Site, people were growing which fruit nearly 7,000 years ago?
Bananas
Bananas. Traces of banana plants in the swamp's ancient garden plots are part of the evidence that New Guinea's highlanders invented farming on their own, one of the few places on Earth where that happened.
Q 23Which highlands city, host of one of the country's biggest cultural shows, is the nearest to Kuk Swamp?
Mount Hagen
Bougainville. The autonomous region moved its clocks forward an hour on 28 December 2014, so it now keeps the same time as the neighbouring Solomon Islands rather than the national capital.
Q 14Which metal came from Panguna, the giant mine at the heart of Papua New Guinea's separatist war of the 1990s?
Copper
Copper. Rebels angry at pollution and at profits leaving their island forced the mine shut in 1989; a 2001 peace deal promised a vote, and in 2019 almost 98 percent chose independence.
Q 15What is the 1997 scandal over hiring mercenaries against island secessionists, which toppled the government, called?
The Sandline affair
The Sandline affair saw Julius Chan's government hire Sandline International to fight island secessionists; army commander Jerry Singirok refused to let the contractors deploy and Chan stepped aside.
Q 16Who became prime minister of Papua New Guinea in 2019 after Peter O'Neill resigned?
James Marape
James Marape, a former finance minister who had quit O'Neill's cabinet weeks earlier, was elected prime minister by parliament in May 2019.
Q 17The Kokoda Track, fought over in 1942, crosses which mountain range?
Owen Stanley Range
Owen Stanley Range. In 1942 Australian troops and Papuan carriers held an invading army on the foot track over these jungle mountains and then drove it back, one of the turning points of the Pacific War.
Q 18Which country lost by far the most men in the New Guinea campaign of World War II?
Japan
Japan. Well over 100,000 Japanese soldiers and sailors died, many times the Allied toll, a great many of them from disease and starvation after Allied advances cut their garrisons off from supply.
Q 19Which currency, named after a pearl shell once used as money, does Papua New Guinea use?
Kina
Kina. The word is Tolai for the pearl oyster shell that passed as money across New Guinea, and the currency took the name when it replaced the Australian dollar in 1975.
Q 20Which creature is silhouetted in gold on Papua New Guinea's flag?
A Raggiana bird-of-paradise
A Raggiana bird-of-paradise in gold soars on the red half of the flag, opposite the Southern Cross on black; the design was a 1971 competition entry by 15-year-old schoolgirl Susan Karike.
Mount Hagen. Outsiders had never seen its valley until 1933, when prospectors came upon it and found it thickly populated; Kuk Swamp nearby shows people had been gardening there for thousands of years.
Q 24Which introduced crop replaced taro as the staple food of Papua New Guinea's highlands a few centuries ago?
Sweet potato
Sweet potato. The plant from the Americas seems to have reached New Guinea only 300 to 400 years ago, yet it took over highland gardens that people had been tending for thousands of years.
Q 25Roughly what share of Papua New Guinea's land is held as customary land by communities?
97 percent
97 percent. Almost all land belongs to clans and communities under custom, most of it never registered, and repeated efforts to bring it under formal title have had little success.
Q 26Which Papua New Guinean town was buried in ash in 1994 when two volcanoes beside its own harbour erupted?
Rabaul
Rabaul. The volcanoes Tavurvur and Vulcan had nearly destroyed the town once before, in 1937, and after the 1994 eruption the provincial capital was moved to nearby Kokopo.
Q 27Which river rises in the Star Mountains and reaches the Gulf of Papua through a delta?
The Fly
The Fly. Boats can travel some 800 km up it, and one of its great bends puts the only kink in the country's otherwise ruler-straight western border.
Q 28The island of New Guinea is the world's second largest, behind only which island?
Greenland
Greenland. New Guinea comes second, and where Greenland lies mostly under ice, New Guinea carries the third-largest rainforest on Earth.
Q 29Which butterfly, found only in a small pocket of Papua New Guinea's rainforest, is the largest in the world?
Queen Alexandra's birdwing
Queen Alexandra's birdwing. Females can span 28 cm, and the collector who found the species in 1906 brought his first specimen down with a shotgun.
Q 30Which is the largest of Papua New Guinea's offshore islands, home to a volcanic peninsula with famously fertile soil?
New Britain
New Britain. The volcanoes whose ash makes the Gazelle Peninsula's soil so rich have also wrecked the island's main town twice, in 1937 and again in 1994.