School Subjects
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50 free School Subjects trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Every school timetable is a tour of human knowledge in miniature: sums before lunch, poems and plays after, with a lab experiment and a run around the gym somewhere in between. This quiz walks the same corridor, one classroom at a time. The questions cover maths, the sciences, English language and literature, history and civics, the map room, art, music and physical education. Some ask for the facts every student meets, and others dig into where the lessons came from: who invented the game played in gym class, why a temperature scale once ran backwards, and which word began as a term for setting bones. It is pitched for anyone who sat through those lessons, from current students and their teachers to adults who want to find out how much has stuck. Each answer comes with a short explanation.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which sport did physical education teacher James Naismith invent in Springfield, Massachusetts, in 1891?
Basketball
Basketball was first played with a soccer ball and a pair of peach baskets as goals. Naismith wrote the original 13 rules for his gym class.
Q 02Which Australian capital city was purpose-built as a compromise between rival cities Sydney and Melbourne?
Canberra
Canberra is an entirely planned city, grounded in a design by American architects Walter Burley Griffin and Marion Mahony Griffin. It settled a long dispute over which of the two larger cities should be the national capital.
Q 03Which branch of mathematics takes its name from an Arabic word in the title of a 9th-century book?
Algebra
Algebra comes from al-jabr, an Arabic term that originally referred to the surgical setting of broken bones. The mathematician al-Khwarizmi used it in the title of his treatise on equations.
Q 04Which structures, nicknamed the powerhouse of the cell, use aerobic respiration to generate ATP?
Mitochondria
Mitochondria got the powerhouse nickname from a 1957 Scientific American article by Philip Siekevitz. Their folded inner membrane increases the surface area for making ATP.
Q 05Which school subject takes its name from Ancient Greek words meaning 'Earth' and 'write'?
Geography
Geography literally means Earth writing, and the Greek scholar Eratosthenes may have coined the term more than 2,200 years ago.
Q 06Which gas makes up about 78 percent of the dry air in the Earth's atmosphere?
Nitrogen
Nitrogen fills 78.08 percent of dry air, while the oxygen people breathe makes up only about 21 percent. Argon is a distant third at under 1 percent.
Q 07Which Greek thinker, born around 570 BC, gives his name to the theorem about right-angled triangles?
Pythagoras
Pythagoras is credited with the rule that the square on a right triangle's longest side equals the sum of the squares on the other two. In antiquity he was also credited with discoveries in music and astronomy.
Q 08Which short Japanese poem traditionally follows a pattern of five, seven and five sound units?
Haiku
Haiku traditionally carry a seasonal reference and a cutting word within their 17 sound units. In Japanese they are printed as a single line, though English versions often appear as three.
Q 09Which German composer was almost completely deaf when his Ninth Symphony premiered in Vienna in 1824?
Ludwig van Beethoven
Ludwig van Beethoven was still conducting after the music stopped, so a singer gently turned him around to see the audience's applause.
Q 10Which document did King John of England seal at Runnymede in 1215 to make peace with rebel barons?
Magna Carta
Magna Carta promised the barons protection from illegal imprisonment and access to swift justice. Its Latin name simply means Great Charter.
Q 11Which kind of whole number, of which seven and thirteen are examples, is divisible only by 1 and itself?
Prime
Prime numbers are central to arithmetic because every whole number above 1 is either prime itself or a unique product of primes.
Q 12Which Greek letter stands for the ratio of a circle's circumference to its diameter, roughly 3.14?
Pi
Pi on its own was used for the circle ratio by Welsh mathematician William Jones in 1706, the earliest known case. Its decimal digits never end and never settle into a permanently repeating pattern.
Q 13In the PEMDAS order of operations taught in American schools, which operation does the letter E stand for?
Exponents
Exponents come second in PEMDAS, after parentheses and before multiplication and division. Canada and New Zealand commonly teach the same order as BEDMAS.
Q 21Which planet is home to the Great Red Spot, a giant storm watched by astronomers since 1831?
Jupiter
Jupiter's Great Red Spot is the largest anticyclonic storm in the Solar System. Around 1900 it stretched about three times the diameter of Earth, and it has shrunk since.
Q 22Which bone, the only one in the upper leg, is the longest in the human body?
Femur
The femur is rated the strongest bone in the body by some measures, though other studies suggest the temporal bone of the skull may be stronger.
Q 23Which naturalist set out the theory of natural selection in the book On the Origin of Species?
Charles Darwin
Charles Darwin spent five years sailing the world on HMS Beagle before writing it. Birds he collected on the Galápagos turned out to be twelve separate species of finches.
Q 14Which ancient number system, still seen on many clock faces, writes fifty as the letter L?
Roman numerals
Roman numerals use only seven letters, from I for 1 up to M for 1,000. Clock faces often show four as IIII, a practice going back to very early clocks.
Q 15Which number pattern, where each term is the sum of the two before it, reached Europe in the 1202 book Liber Abaci?
Fibonacci sequence
The Fibonacci sequence appears in the book as a way to calculate the growth of rabbit populations. It is named after the author, Leonardo of Pisa, who was also known as Fibonacci.
Q 16Which Italian scientist's name is attached to the constant that counts the particles in one mole of a substance?
Amedeo Avogadro
Amedeo Avogadro proposed in 1811 that equal volumes of gas contain equal numbers of molecules, whatever the gas. The constant, about 6.022 × 10²³ per mole, is now fixed as an exact SI value.
Q 17Which chemist arranged the known elements into a periodic table and predicted three that were still undiscovered?
Dmitri Mendeleev
Dmitri Mendeleev used his periodic law to predict the properties of germanium, gallium and scandium before anyone had found them. The synthetic element mendelevium is named in his honour.
Q 18What is the chemical symbol for gold, the precious metal with atomic number 79?
Au
Au is short for aurum, the Latin word for gold. Ag, which is often confused with it, comes from argentum and belongs to silver.
Q 19Which English scientist set out three laws of motion in his book known as the Principia?
Isaac Newton
Isaac Newton first published the Principia in 1687, written in Latin across three volumes. It also sets out his law of universal gravitation.
Q 20Which number system, credited to Gottfried Leibniz, do computers use because it needs only two symbols?
Binary
Binary writes every number with just 0 and 1, which makes it straightforward to build into digital electronic circuits using logic gates.
Q 24Which temperature scale, named after a Swedish astronomer, puts the boiling point of water at 100 degrees?
Celsius
Celsius originally ran backwards: in the 1742 version, water boiled at 0 degrees and froze at 100. Others had flipped the scale by 1744, the year its inventor died.
Q 25Which process do plants use to make food from carbon dioxide and water using energy from light?
Photosynthesis
Photosynthesis is the main source of the oxygen in the Earth's atmosphere. Plants absorb the light with chlorophyll, a pigment that reflects green.
Q 26Which Polish-born scientist was the first person to win two Nobel Prizes, in physics and chemistry?
Marie Curie
Marie Curie shared the 1903 physics prize for research on radioactivity, then won the 1911 chemistry prize. She named the element polonium after her native country.
Q 27Which hardness ranking for minerals, introduced by a German geologist in 1812, puts diamond at the top with 10?
Mohs scale
The Mohs scale works by scratching: a harder mineral leaves a mark on a softer one. Its steps are uneven, so diamond at 10 is about four times as hard as corundum at 9.
Q 28Which botanist formalised the two-part Latin naming system that labels humans Homo sapiens?
Carl Linnaeus
Carl Linnaeus formalised binomial nomenclature, the modern system of naming organisms. He himself is designated the type specimen for the human species.
Q 29Which German scientist proposed in 1912 that the continents are slowly drifting around the Earth?
Alfred Wegener
Alfred Wegener was known in his lifetime mainly for meteorology and polar research. Mainstream geology did not accept his drifting continents until the 1960s.
Q 30Which nutrient, found in meat, eggs and legumes, is built from chains of amino acids?
Protein
Protein supplies nine essential amino acids that the human body cannot make for itself, so they have to come from food.