Safety Trivia
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110 free Safety trivia questions with answers — science & nature quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
53 free Safety trivia questions with answers. Safety trivia is a staple of workplace toolbox talks, school assemblies and Safety Week contests, and this set is built to be used for exactly that. Fifty-three questions cover fire safety (the fire triangle, extinguisher classes, stop drop and roll, smoke and CO alarms), first aid (CPR rates, the Heimlich manoeuvre, the recovery position, AEDs), road safety (the three-point seat belt, airbags, BAC limits, texting risk), workplace safety (OSHA, hard hats, lockout-tagout, PPE, hazard symbols) and home and outdoor safety (drowning, lightning, sun, food temperatures). A good share are easy enough for kids and new hires: what number to call, what to do if your clothes catch fire, what a scarecrow of a bear tells you about wildfires. The hard ones ask who invented the seat belt, when 911 was first dialled and what the biohazard symbol was designed for. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's articles on the topics involved, and each question shows the sentence that backs it up. Useful for training, but not a substitute for it.
30 of 110 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01If your clothing catches fire, what three-step technique are children taught?
Stop, drop and roll
Stop, drop and roll has a step the slogan leaves out: once on the ground you cover your face with your hands, then roll over and over until the flames are out.
Q 02The fire triangle shows a fire needs heat, fuel and what third element?
Oxygen
Oxygen is the side a fire blanket removes: laid over a small blaze it starves the flames of air, and with any one side of the triangle gone the fire goes out.
Q 03Fires involving ordinary solids such as paper and wood fall into which category?
Class A
Class A fires are the ones water suits best, soaking in and cooling the fuel, which is why the number before the A on a US extinguisher label counts water in 1.25-gallon units.
Q 04Which consumer advocate's 1965 book Unsafe at Any Speed accused carmakers of resisting safer designs?
Ralph Nader
Ralph Nader's book rattled General Motors into hiring private detectives to dig into his life; its president ended up apologising to a Senate subcommittee, and Nader won $425,000 for invasion of privacy.
Q 05Household smoke detectors sense smoke either optically or by which other process?
Ionization
Ionization alarms carry a speck of radioactive americium-241 that keeps a tiny current flowing through the air inside; smoke breaks that flow and sets off the alarm.
Q 06The gas that CO alarms detect is nicknamed the 'silent killer' because it is what?
Colourless and odourless
Colourless and odourless, the gas gives no warning of its own, so the first clue is usually how people feel: a headache, dizziness and sickness that are easy to blame on something else.
Q 07Heart charities have taught CPR rescuers to push hard and fast to the beat of which disco hit?
Stayin' Alive
Stayin' Alive was chosen because its beat falls inside the 100 to 120 chest compressions a minute that CPR calls for; ex-footballer Vinnie Jones fronted the British advert.
Q 08The Heimlich manoeuvre is used to treat what emergency?
Choking
Choking first aid no longer opens with the famous thrusts: most guidance now says to encourage coughing, then give five back blows, and only then five abdominal thrusts.
Q 09An AED's shock is meant to stop ventricular fibrillation, a state in which the heart is doing what?
Quivering chaotically
Quivering chaotically, the ventricles pump no blood; the shock halts the chaos so a normal rhythm can take over again, which is why a true flatline, with nothing to reset, is not shocked at all.
Q 10The recovery position is used for a casualty who is unconscious but still what?
Breathing
Breathing is the test: a casualty who is breathing normally is rolled onto their side, where the airway stays open and any vomit can drain away, while one who is not needs CPR.
Q 11Which Swedish carmaker introduced the three-point seat belt as standard in 1959?
Volvo
Volvo then gave its invention away, opening the patent so that any rival carmaker could fit engineer Nils Bohlin's three-point belt for free in the interests of safety.
Q 12Classic car airbags inflate when a crash sensor ignites sodium azide, which breaks down to release which gas?
Nitrogen
Nitrogen is made on the spot rather than stored: an igniter's heat breaks the chemical apart, and a handful of it yields enough gas to fill the bag in about three hundredths of a second.
Q 13Vince and Larry, who urged Americans to buckle up in 1980s adverts, were what?
Crash test dummies
Q 21America's first hard hat, a canvas design, was inspired by steel helmets worn in which war?
World War I
World War I showed cavalry officer Edward Bullard what a helmet could do, and back home he built a peacetime version from canvas shaped with steam, which is how his 'Hard Boiled Hat' got its name.
Q 22Lockout-tagout procedures ensure that dangerous equipment cannot be what during maintenance?
Restarted
Restarted by surprise is the danger, so each worker fits a personal padlock to the shut-off power supply and keeps the key, leaving nobody else able to switch the machine back on mid-repair.
Q 23In the hierarchy of hazard controls, which two measures sit at the top as most effective?
Elimination and substitution
Crash test dummies Vince and Larry carried the slogan 'You could learn a lot from a dummy'; the first real one, Sierra Sam, was built to test aircraft ejection seats, not cars.
Q 14US road-safety officials say reading a text at 55 mph is like driving blind for the length of what?
Football field
A football field slips past because a text holds the eyes for about five seconds; Virginia Tech's in-cab cameras found truckers who texted were 23 times likelier to crash or nearly crash.
Q 15Britain's 1865 law on steam road vehicles required a crewman to walk ahead of each one carrying what?
Red flag
A red flag gave the Red Flag Act its nickname; the law also held road vehicles to 2 mph in towns and 4 mph in the country, and light vehicles were not freed from those limits until 1896.
Q 16The world's first traffic signal, gas-lit in 1868, stood outside which landmark?
Houses of Parliament
The Houses of Parliament signal, worked by hand by a policeman, lasted about a month before a gas leak made it explode, injuring him and ending the experiment.
Q 17The black-and-white striped zebra crossing was first trialled in which country?
United Kingdom
The United Kingdom laid the first in Slough in 1951, and the one the Beatles walked across for the Abbey Road album cover became such a landmark that it is now a protected heritage site.
Q 18America's first 911 call was placed in 1968 in Haleyville, a small town in which Deep South state?
Alabama
Alabama got there first because a small independent phone company rushed its own 911 service into Haleyville's police station, beating the giant AT&T to the number AT&T had just announced.
Q 19Household bleach gives off a toxic gas when it is mixed with which other common cleaning chemical?
Ammonia
Ammonia and bleach react to release toxic fumes that irritate the eyes and throat and can seriously harm the lungs, which makes it a common and dangerous household mistake.
Q 20OSHA, the US workplace safety regulator, was created by a law signed in 1970 by which president?
Richard Nixon
Richard Nixon signed it after a three-year fight in Congress; Lyndon Johnson had proposed much the same law in 1968, calling job deaths 'the shame of a modern industrial nation', but his bill died.
Elimination and substitution lead the list because a hazard that has been removed, or swapped for something safer, no longer needs anyone to guard against it; protective gear such as gloves comes last.
Q 24A ground-fault circuit interrupter outlet, common in bathrooms, cuts the power to prevent what?
Electric shock
Electric shock is headed off early: the device compares the current flowing out with the current coming back, and if a little leaks away, perhaps through a person, it cuts the power in as little as a fortieth of a second.
Q 25A Dow Chemical engineer designed which symbol in 1966 to be 'memorable but meaningless' until people were taught it?
Biohazard
The biohazard symbol won a nationwide test of candidate designs: people could guess least about what it meant, yet a week later it was the one they remembered best.
Q 26The three-bladed radiation warning symbol was first sketched in 1946 at the radiation lab of which California university?
UC Berkeley
UC Berkeley's first signs were magenta on a blue background rather than today's yellow; the magenta was chosen partly because it was expensive, so nobody else would be tempted to use it.
Q 27Mr. Yuk, a sour green face, was created to replace which warning symbol?
Skull and crossbones
Skull and crossbones was judged a poor warning for small children, so Pittsburgh's poison centre designed Mr. Yuk to look as unappealing to them as it could.
Q 28Chemist Stephanie Kwolek's 1965 discovery at DuPont, a fibre five times stronger than steel by weight, is sold as what?
Kevlar
Kevlar began as a thin, cloudy solution that looked like a failure, and colleagues feared it would clog the spinning machine; when Kwolek had it spun anyway, the fibre would not break.
Q 29Smokey Bear's slogan was updated in 2001 from 'Only You Can Prevent Forest Fires' to prevent what?
Wildfires
Wildfires replaced 'forest fires' after huge blazes in grasslands and other country outside forests, and to make clear that Smokey opposes unplanned fires, not the controlled burns foresters set on purpose.
Q 30The real bear cub who became the living Smokey was rescued in 1950 from a blaze in which Southwestern state's Capitan Mountains?
New Mexico
New Mexico firefighters found the cub clinging to a charred tree with burned paws; at the National Zoo in Washington he drew so many letters that the Postal Service gave him his own ZIP code.