Rhetoric
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50 free Rhetoric trivia questions with answers — literature quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Rhetoric is the craft of changing minds with words, and it has been studied for some 2,500 years. Politicians, advertisers, lawyers and essayists all draw on the same toolkit the Greeks and Romans first wrote down, which is why the subject still anchors courses such as AP English Language. This quiz covers that toolkit from several angles. You will be asked to tell Aristotle's modes of persuasion apart, to identify rhetorical devices from short examples, to name common logical fallacies, and to match landmark speeches with the people who gave them. A handful of questions look at the rhetorical question itself and its lesser-known relatives, and one shows how the word trivial is tied to rhetoric's place in the medieval curriculum. It is built for students revising rhetorical terms, for teachers who want a ready-made review, and for anyone who enjoys knowing exactly how a good argument, or a bad one, works. Every answer comes with a short explanation, so a wrong guess still teaches you the term.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which of Aristotle's three modes of persuasion rests on the credibility and character of the speaker?
Ethos
Ethos comes from the Greek word for character, which is also the root of the English word ethics. A speaker builds it by showing practical wisdom, virtue and goodwill toward the audience.
Q 02Which figure of speech, seen in 'bittersweet' and 'cruel kindness', takes its name from Greek words for sharp and dull?
Oxymoron
Oxymoron is an example of itself, since a word meaning 'sharp-dull' is a contradiction in terms. Shakespeare's Romeo reels off a string of them in a single speech about love.
Q 03Which fallacy of distraction was popularised by William Cobbett's 1807 tale of a smelly lure dragged past hounds?
Red herring
Red herring began as a real food, a kipper cured until its flesh turned reddish and pungent. Cobbett told the tale to mock English newspapers that had wrongly reported a defeat for Napoleon.
Q 04Which British prime minister won the 1953 Nobel Prize in Literature, with a citation praising his brilliant oratory?
Winston Churchill
Winston Churchill was also nominated twice for the Nobel Peace Prize, which he never won. The literature citation honoured his mastery of history and biography as well as his speeches.
Q 05Which figure of speech is at work when Jaques in As You Like It declares that all the world is a stage?
Metaphor
Metaphor is itself a metaphor: the Greek word means to carry over, as if meaning were cargo. Jaques goes on to divide a man's life into seven ages.
Q 06Which sound device drives the Peter Piper tongue twister, with its run of words that start with p?
Alliteration
Alliteration repeats the consonant sound at the start of nearby words. Old English poets built their verse on it instead of rhyme, which is how Beowulf holds together.
Q 07Which character in Shakespeare's Julius Caesar turns a Roman crowd against the conspirators with a funeral speech?
Mark Antony
Mark Antony keeps calling Brutus an honourable man until the praise turns into an accusation. He had promised the assassins not to blame them, so irony had to do the work.
Q 08Which device, from the Greek for 'throwing beyond', is at work when a hiker claims to have walked a million miles?
Hyperbole
Hyperbole is exaggeration that nobody is meant to take literally. US courts even have a term, 'rhetorical hyperbole', for extravagant exaggeration used for effect when they weigh First Amendment cases.
Q 09Which fallacy, known in Latin as argumentum ad populum, claims that an idea must be right because it is popular?
Bandwagon
Bandwagon first meant the wagon that carried the band in a circus parade. Winning political campaigns paraded them too, and by 1899 Theodore Roosevelt was using the phrase for joining a likely winner.
Q 10Which Athenian orator is said to have cured a stammer by practising speeches with pebbles in his mouth?
Demosthenes
Demosthenes also recited verses while running to strengthen his breath, in Plutarch's telling. The effort made him the voice of Athenian resistance to Philip II of Macedon.
Q 11Pathos, one of Aristotle's three modes of persuasion, is an appeal to what in an audience?
Emotions
Emotions change people's judgments, Aristotle observed, so his Rhetoric studies them in opposing pairs such as anger and calmness. Anger, he wrote, springs from a feeling of being belittled.
Q 12A speaker using logos, as Aristotle described it in his Rhetoric, appeals chiefly to which faculty of the audience?
Reason
Reason is only one sense of logos, which in Greek also means word and discourse. It is the source of the English word logic.
Q 13Which foundation course of the medieval liberal arts grouped rhetoric with grammar and logic?
Trivium
Trivium is Latin for a place where three roads meet, and it is also the root of the English word trivial. Students who finished it moved on to arithmetic, geometry, music and astronomy.
Q 21Which Athenian statesman's Funeral Oration for the war dead is preserved in the history written by Thucydides?
Pericles
Pericles may not have phrased it this way: Thucydides set the speech down in the first person but almost certainly edited it. Scholars have traced its parallels with Lincoln's Gettysburg Address.
Q 22Which abolitionist's 1851 speech in Akron, Ohio, is known by the rhetorical question 'Ain't I a Woman?'
Sojourner Truth
Sojourner Truth never asks the question in the first full report of the speech. It appears in a version printed twelve years later, which also gave the New York-born speaker a Southern dialect.
Q 23Which Roman consul denounced Catiline's plot in four speeches of 63 BC and later wrote the dialogue De Oratore?
Cicero
Q 14Which US president declared solidarity with a divided city in his 1963 speech 'Ich bin ein Berliner'?
John F. Kennedy
John F. Kennedy did not call himself a jelly doughnut: that story surfaced two decades later, and Berliners call the pastry a Pfannkuchen.
Q 15Which fallacy, known in Britain as an Aunt Sally, attacks a distorted version of an opponent's position?
Straw man
Straw man arguments are easy to knock down because the speaker built them for that purpose. Debaters call the opposite habit steelmanning: answering the strongest form of the other side's case.
Q 16Which Latin-named fallacy attacks a speaker's character or motives instead of the substance of the claim?
Ad hominem
Ad hominem means 'to the person', and a plain insult does not qualify: the fallacy lies in treating a flaw in the speaker as proof against the claim. John Locke revived its study in the 17th century.
Q 17Which travelling teachers of ancient Greece, Protagoras among them, charged high fees for lessons in rhetoric?
Sophists
Sophists were accused by Athenian philosophers of prizing cleverness over knowledge, which is why sophistry now means a deceptive argument. Their clients were typically the wealthy.
Q 18Which device did Martin Luther King Jr. use in I Have a Dream by opening successive sentences with the same words?
Anaphora
Anaphora here was partly improvised: King left his prepared text for the dream passage after the singer Mahalia Jackson called out from behind him, urging him to tell the crowd about the dream.
Q 19Paronomasia is the formal name for which kind of wordplay, found an estimated 3,000 times in Shakespeare's plays?
A pun
A pun was Shakespeare's fatal weakness in the eyes of Samuel Johnson, who complained that he would chase one anywhere. Even the dying Mercutio gets one, joking that tomorrow he will be a grave man.
Q 20Which device ends successive phrases with the same words, as the Gettysburg Address does with 'the people'?
Epistrophe
Epistrophe is the mirror image of the device that repeats words at the start of clauses. Lincoln needed few words of any kind: the whole address ran to ten sentences and took about two minutes to deliver.
Cicero had five of the conspirators executed without trial, and the decision caught up with him: he was exiled in 58 BC and recalled the following year.
Q 24Which philosopher wrote the dialogue Gorgias, in which Socrates likens rhetoric to pastry baking rather than a true art?
Plato
Plato has Socrates call rhetoric mere flattery, saying it is to politics what pastry baking is to medicine. His pupil Aristotle later treated the subject far more seriously.
Q 25Which Virginian is credited with a 1775 speech demanding liberty or death, reconstructed in 1817 by William Wirt?
Patrick Henry
Patrick Henry left no script, so the text everyone knows was pieced together from the memories of elderly witnesses, eighteen years after his death. The speech still swung Virginia toward raising troops.
Q 26Which term, from the Greek for 'name-making', covers words such as beep, splash and cuckoo that imitate sounds?
Onomatopoeia
Onomatopoeia changes with the language even when the noise does not: a frog says ribbit in American English but brekekekex koax koax in Aristophanes' Greek comedy The Frogs.
Q 27Which term, from Greek words for 'good' and 'speech', describes saying 'passed away' in place of 'died'?
Euphemism
Euphemism began as one: for the ancient Greeks the word could mean keeping a holy silence, speaking well by not speaking at all.
Q 28Which fallacy, also called the thin edge of the wedge, claims one small step must lead to disaster?
Slippery slope
Slippery slope arguments travel under vivid nicknames, among them the camel's nose in the tent and the parade of horribles. They fail when nothing shows that each step really causes the next.
Q 29Which device of contrast shapes the opening of Dickens's A Tale of Two Cities, pairing the best of times with the worst?
Antithesis
Antithesis comes from Greek words for 'setting opposite'. Dickens keeps the pattern running through wisdom and foolishness, belief and incredulity, Light and Darkness, hope and despair.
Q 30Which Greek word, also the name of a minor god of opportunity, means the right moment to speak or act?
Kairos
Kairos is time as a moment to be seized, while chronos is time that can be counted. Greek writers pictured it through archery: the instant an arrow can be loosed with enough force to pierce the target.