Real or Fake News
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40 free Real or Fake News trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Some of the strangest headlines ever printed were completely accurate, and some of the most convincing were invented from start to finish. Telling them apart is harder than it sounds, which is exactly what makes a real or fake news quiz fun. This quiz mixes both kinds. You will meet genuine events that read like jokes, classic April Fools' stunts, forged documents, staged photographs and broadcasts that audiences took at face value. A few questions cover how false stories travel today: satire shared as fact, doctored video and websites that publish fabricated articles for clicks. It suits classrooms working on media literacy, quiz nights that want a talking point, and anyone who enjoys saying 'that cannot be right' and then checking. Every answer comes with a short explanation, so you leave knowing what actually happened.
30 of 40 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Australian soldiers armed with machine guns fought a 1932 'war' against which wheat-raiding birds?
Emus
Emus won the 'war': the field force withdrew after about a month, leaving most of the flock untouched.
Q 02On April Fools' Day 1957, the BBC's Panorama showed a Swiss family happily harvesting what from trees?
Spaghetti
Spaghetti was still exotic in 1950s Britain, so hundreds of viewers phoned the BBC, some asking how to grow a tree of their own.
Q 03In 1919, a burst storage tank sent a deadly wave of what through the streets of Boston's North End?
Molasses
Molasses surged through the streets at about 35 miles per hour, killing 21 people and injuring 150.
Q 04After 'Boaty McBoatface' won a 2016 public vote, Britain's polar ship was named after which broadcaster?
David Attenborough
David Attenborough got the ship, although the joke name had won with more than 124,000 votes. Boaty McBoatface went to one of its robot submarines instead.
Q 05Oregon highway officials made headlines in 1970 by using dynamite to remove what from a beach?
A dead whale
A dead whale, a 45-foot sperm whale, was blown up at Florence, and large chunks of blubber rained down on parking lots and damaged a car.
Q 06In 1982, Larry Walters drifted 16,000 feet above Los Angeles in what, lifted by 42 weather balloons?
A lawn chair
A lawn chair was all Walters sat in as he drifted into controlled airspace near Long Beach Airport. He came down tangled in power lines and climbed off safely.
Q 07A 1990s Pepsi commercial led a student to sue the company for which prize, priced at 7,000,000 points?
A Harrier jet
A Harrier jet cost roughly $23 million by the court's reckoning, and the judge ruled that no reasonable person could have taken the commercial as a serious offer.
Q 08Thieves made headlines in 2012 by draining nearly 3,000 tonnes of what from a strategic reserve in Quebec?
Maple syrup
Maple syrup worth C$18.7 million vanished over several months from a facility run by a federation that controls most of the world's supply.
Q 09Which farm animal named Mike toured US sideshows in the 1940s while living 18 months without a head?
A chicken
A chicken from Fruita, Colorado, Mike survived a botched beheading because most of his brain stem was left intact.
Q 10Which actor narrated the 1938 radio drama 'The War of the Worlds' that some listeners mistook for real news?
Orson Welles
Orson Welles told the Martian invasion as a run of news bulletins breaking into an ordinary evening of radio, though the scale of the panic is disputed.
Q 11A rumour sweeping US campuses in 1969 claimed which Beatle had died and been replaced by a lookalike?
Paul McCartney
Paul McCartney supposedly died in a car crash in 1966, and hunting for hidden clues in the Beatles' songs and cover artwork became an international craze.
Q 12At the 2017 Oscars, which film was wrongly named Best Picture before Moonlight got the award?
La La Land
La La Land producer Jordan Horowitz stepped to the microphone himself to announce the error, then held up the card showing that Moonlight had won.
Q 13Which satirical paper, founded by two students in Madison, Wisconsin, is often mistaken for real news?
The Onion
Q 21The 1934 'Surgeon's Photograph', bought by the Daily Mail and later exposed as a hoax, claimed to show what?
The Loch Ness Monster
The Loch Ness Monster in the picture was reportedly just a toy submarine, and one of the men behind it admitted decades later that the photo was a hoax.
Q 22Which famous painter was brought in for questioning after the Mona Lisa was stolen from the Louvre in 1911?
Pablo Picasso
Pablo Picasso was implicated by his friend, the poet Guillaume Apollinaire, who had been arrested first. The real thief was a museum worker who had helped build the painting's glass case.
Q 23Who found the stolen World Cup trophy wrapped in newspaper beside a parked car in March 1966?
A pet dog
The Onion began as a weekly campus paper, and its straight-faced style has led officials and news outlets abroad to repeat its spoof stories as fact.
Q 14The long-running 'dihydrogen monoxide' hoax uses a scary chemical name to make people want to ban what?
Water
Water is simply H2O under an unfamiliar name. The parody lists true but alarming facts about it, such as that it speeds up rusting and can suffocate.
Q 15Which email service launched on April Fools' Day 2004 with so much free storage that many assumed a prank?
Gmail
Gmail offered one gigabyte, far more than its rivals, and Google was already known for April Fools' jokes, so the announcement met with scepticism.
Q 16Which pop duo had a Grammy revoked in 1990 after it emerged that other singers had recorded their vocals?
Milli Vanilli
Milli Vanilli danced and mimed while hired singers made the records. Their label later deleted the album from its catalogue and refunded customers.
Q 17Which 1999 horror film's promotional campaign listed its three lead actors as 'missing' or 'deceased'?
The Blair Witch Project
The Blair Witch Project was shot for well under $100,000 and presented as footage left behind by students who vanished in the Maryland woods.
Q 18Which landmark did American developer Robert McCulloch buy in 1968 and rebuild in his new Arizona city?
London Bridge
London Bridge could no longer carry the capital's traffic, so the City of London sold it. Its granite facing blocks were shipped to Lake Havasu City and fixed to a new structure.
Q 19Con man Victor Lustig posed as a French government official in 1925 to 'sell' which Paris landmark?
The Eiffel Tower
The Eiffel Tower was costly to keep up, so Lustig told a group of scrap metal dealers that the government wanted it sold off quietly.
Q 20In 1991, Englishmen Doug Bower and Dave Chorley revealed they had spent years secretly making what?
Crop circles
Crop circles, more than 200 of them across England, were the pair's handiwork, made with little more than a plank of wood and a length of rope.
A pet dog called Pickles, a four-year-old collie, came across it on a walk with his owner. When England won the tournament, Pickles was invited to the celebration banquet.
Q 24Arthur Conan Doyle championed photographs, taken by two young English cousins, that claimed to show what?
Fairies
Fairies copied from a children's book and cut out of cardboard were posed for the camera; the cousins only admitted the trick in the early 1980s.
Q 25Which American author told a New York newspaper in 1897 that reports of his death had been exaggerated?
Mark Twain
Mark Twain was fine: a journalist had been sent to ask after his health when it was really his cousin who was very ill.
Q 26The term 'yellow journalism', coined for sensational 1890s New York newspapers, takes its name from what?
Comic strip
Comic strip star the Yellow Kid ran first in Joseph Pulitzer's World and then in its great rival, while the two papers fought a circulation war.
Q 27Which agency's 1960s 'Acoustic Kitty' operation tried to use cats to spy on Soviet embassies?
The CIA
The CIA spent about $20 million on the scheme, a former officer later said, before it was cancelled in 1967.
Q 28Which leader did China's People's Daily Online hail as 'Sexiest Man Alive' in 2012 after falling for a spoof?
Kim Jong-un
Kim Jong-un was given a 55-page photo gallery in tribute, because the Communist Party newspaper's site had taken an American satirical article at face value.
Q 29Which term did Oxford Dictionaries name its 2016 Word of the Year?
Post-truth
Post-truth took the title after its use soared during the Brexit referendum and that year's American presidential election.
Q 30The word 'deepfake' comes from the username of someone who shared face-swapped videos on which site in 2017?
Reddit hosted both the user 'deepfakes' and a forum of the same name; the handle blends 'deep learning' with 'fake'.