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
The western half is Indonesian; Australia and the Solomon Islands are neighbours only across the water.
Q 02What is the capital of Papua New Guinea?
Port Moresby
It sits in a rain shadow on the south coast and gets under 1,000 mm of rain a year, while some highland areas get eight times that.
Q 03Papua New Guinea has roughly how many known spoken languages, more than any other country?
840
Most are spoken by fewer than a thousand people; only Vanuatu packs its languages more densely.
Q 04Which English-based creole is the most widely used language in Papua New Guinea?
Tok Pisin
Its name comes from 'talk' and 'pidgin'; five to six million people use it, and many children now grow up with it as a first language.
Q 05Which trade pidgin is a national language of Papua New Guinea alongside English and Tok Pisin?
Hiri Motu
It took hold in the British- and Australian-run south; sign language was added as a fourth recognised language in 2015.
Q 06'New Guinea' was coined in 1545 by a Spaniard who thought the people resembled those of where?
West Africa's coast
Ynigo Ortiz de Retez made the comparison; 'Papua' had been applied by the Portuguese two decades earlier.
Q 07In 1884 eastern New Guinea was split between the British in the south and which power in the north?
Germany
Australia seized the German half in 1914 and later ran it as a League of Nations mandate; the two territories were merged in 1949.
Q 08Papua New Guinea gained independence from Australia as a Commonwealth realm in which year?
1975
Gough Whitlam's government drove the timetable; the kina had been introduced as a separate currency that April.
Q 09Who was Papua New Guinea's first prime minister, known as the 'father of the nation'?
Michael Somare
He was Chief Minister from 1972, served 17 years as PM over three stints and liked to appear in a lap-lap rather than trousers.
Q 10Which mountain, at 4,509 metres, is the highest point in Papua New Guinea?
Mount Wilhelm
A German journalist named it in 1888 after Chancellor Bismarck's son; a US bomber crashed into it in 1944.
Q 11Which river, the longest on the island of New Guinea, winds without a delta into the Bismarck Sea?
The Sepik
It is navigable for most of its 1,100 km, and its villages are famed for carved spirit houses.
Q 12The shallow waterway separating Papua New Guinea from Australia's Cape York Peninsula is called what?
Torres Strait
It is only about 152 km wide; rising seas cut New Guinea off from Australia around 10,000 years ago.
Q 13Which region of Papua New Guinea keeps its clocks one hour ahead of the rest of the country?
Bougainville
The autonomous region lies far to the east, closer culturally and geographically to the Solomon Islands.
Q 21Papua New Guinea's rugby league team, the Kumuls, takes its nickname from the local word for what?
Birds-of-paradise
Rugby league is the national sport, brought by Australian soldiers in the 1940s; fans have died in clashes over results.
Q 22Papua New Guinea's only UNESCO World Heritage Site, inscribed in 2008, preserves evidence of what?
Early independent agriculture
Drainage ditches at Kuk Swamp go back some 9,000 years, and banana and sugar cane were being cultivated there 6,400 to 6,900 years ago.
Q 23The Kuk Early Agricultural Site sits in the highlands near which provincial capital?
Mount Hagen
Q 14What share of Bougainville voters backed independence from Papua New Guinea in the 2019 referendum?
98 percent
The vote was promised in the 2001 peace agreement that ended a decade of civil war sparked by the Panguna copper mine.
Q 15What is the 1997 scandal over hiring mercenaries against island secessionists, which toppled the government, called?
The Sandline affair
Army chief Jerry Singirok refused to let the contractors deploy and the prime minister was forced out.
Q 16The 1942 Kokoda Track campaign saw Australian and Papuan troops halt a Japanese advance towards which city?
Port Moresby
The Japanese got within sight of the city before withdrawing in September; the track runs 96 km over the mountains.
Q 17The Kokoda Track crosses which mountains on its way from the north coast towards the capital?
Owen Stanley Range
Papuan carriers who hauled supplies and wounded along it became known to Australians as the 'Fuzzy Wuzzy Angels'.
Q 18Roughly how many Japanese, Australian and US servicemen died in the New Guinea campaign?
216,000
Milne Bay, alongside Kokoda and Guadalcanal, marked the turning point of the Pacific War; fighting continued until 1944.
Q 19Papua New Guinea's currency, the kina, takes its name from what?
A pearl shell used in trade
The word is from the Tolai people's Kuanua language; it replaced the Australian dollar at par in 1975 and is divided into 100 toea.
Q 20Which creature is silhouetted in gold on Papua New Guinea's flag?
A Raggiana bird-of-paradise
The design, with the Southern Cross on black below, was chosen in 1971 from a competition entry by schoolgirl Susan Karike.
The swamp lies in the Wahgi Valley at about 1,550 metres, on the edge of where taro could be grown.
Q 24Which introduced crop replaced taro as the highland staple and let farming climb to 2,700 metres?
Sweet potato
It came via Portuguese traders and the Moluccas in the 17th or 18th century and helped the population boom and the 'big man' system spread.
Q 25Roughly what share of Papua New Guinea's land is held as customary land by communities?
97 percent
Most titles are unregistered; the country's constitution explicitly protects traditional communities.
Q 26Which Papua New Guinean township was destroyed in 1994 by ash from volcanoes erupting in its own harbour?
Rabaul
It had been the capital of German New Guinea and a major Japanese base; the 1937 eruption had already wrecked it once.
Q 27How many active volcanoes does Papua New Guinea have?
14
There are 22 dormant ones too; the country straddles the meeting point of the Indo-Australian and Pacific plates on the Ring of Fire.
Q 28Papua New Guinea's forests, the world's third-largest rainforest, hold roughly what share of all known species?
5 percent
Perhaps a third of those species live nowhere else; there are over 2,000 orchid species alone.
Q 29Bowerbirds, monotremes and birds of paradise live on Papua New Guinea's mainland but are absent from where?
The large northeastern islands
The big islands to the northeast were never joined to the mainland, so they evolved their own fruit bats and frogs instead.
Q 30Which is Papua New Guinea's largest island, home to a volcanic peninsula with famously fertile soil?
New Britain
Along with more than 600 smaller ones; the volcanic Gazelle Peninsula around Rabaul gives New Britain its fertile soil.