Sexual Health
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40 free Sexual Health trivia questions with answers — science & nature quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Sexual health has one of the strangest histories in medicine. For centuries people tried remedies that sound like practical jokes, blamed their neighbours for every outbreak, and whispered about subjects that doctors now discuss openly. The facts behind it all are surprising, sometimes funny, and worth knowing. This quiz covers the ground a good health class would: how contraception developed from ancient recipes to modern methods, where well-known infections came from and how they are treated, how the body works, and the scientists, campaigners and celebrities who changed public attitudes. The questions are written for curious adults and older students rather than specialists. They run from easy openers to a few tougher ones for quiz regulars, and every answer comes with a short explanation, so you finish knowing more than when you started.
30 of 40 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01A contraceptive recipe in an Egyptian papyrus from about 1850 BC called for the dung of which animal?
Crocodile
Crocodile dung was shaped into a pessary in the Kahun Gynecological Papyrus, which also suggests acacia gum, an ingredient later shown to have real sperm-killing properties.
Q 02Which marsupial faces its own chlamydia epidemic, an infection that can attack its eyes and urinary tract?
Koala
Koala hospital records kept over 30 years show chlamydia was the most common reason for admission after injuries.
Q 03The hormones in the first birth control pills were made from a wild Mexican variety of which root vegetable?
Yam
Yam roots from the rain forests of Veracruz gave chemist Russell Marker a cheap source of progesterone, and steroid prices plummeted once the trade took off.
Q 04Which condom brand was launched in 1929 by the London Rubber Company?
Durex
Durex is short for durability, reliability and excellence, a name the London Rubber Company coined three years before it began making condoms under its own brand.
Q 05Which British royal held hands with an AIDS patient in 1987, challenging fears that touch could spread the illness?
Princess Diana
Princess Diana was the first British royal to make physical contact with AIDS patients, and she later opened a home for young patients in Washington, DC.
Q 06Which 4-foot-7 sex therapist, host of the radio show Sexually Speaking, had trained as a sniper as a teenager?
Ruth Westheimer
Ruth Westheimer joined the Haganah at 17 and learned to assemble a rifle in the dark, decades before America knew her as Dr. Ruth.
Q 07Which hormone, also called the 'cuddle hormone', is nicknamed the 'love hormone' for its role in social bonding?
Oxytocin
Oxytocin also drives the contractions of labour, and its name comes from ancient words meaning 'swift childbirth'.
Q 08After a 1495 outbreak in Naples, syphilis was named after which country, whose troops were blamed for spreading it?
France
France returned the insult by calling it the Neapolitan disease, while the Russians blamed the Poles and the Dutch blamed the Spanish.
Q 09Which human cell, one of the largest in the body, is just visible to the naked eye without a microscope?
An egg
An egg can be seen without a lens, yet nobody identified one in a mammal until Karl Ernst von Baer did in 1827.
Q 10Genetic evidence suggests human ancestors caught pubic lice more than three million years ago from which other primates?
Gorillas
Gorillas carry the closest relative of the human pubic louse, and early humans may have picked it up by sleeping in nests the apes had left.
Q 11Which Los Angeles Lakers star retired abruptly in 1991 after announcing that he had contracted HIV?
Magic Johnson
Magic Johnson came back for the 1992 All-Star Game, where he was named MVP, and went on to campaign for HIV prevention and safe sex.
Q 12Which toxic metal, rubbed on the skin or inhaled as vapour, was a standard syphilis treatment for centuries?
Mercury
Mercury was sometimes vaporized over a fire while the patient sat shut inside a box with only the head left outside.
Q 13Syphilis is named after the hero of a 1530 Latin poem by Girolamo Fracastoro, a character with which occupation?
Shepherd
A shepherd named Syphilus is the poem's protagonist, and his name may itself be borrowed from a character in Ovid's Metamorphoses.
Q 21Which 18th-century Venetian adventurer wrote of using 'assurance caps' to avoid fathering children with his lovers?
Casanova
Giacomo Casanova is among the first people on record using condoms to prevent pregnancy, and an old illustration shows him inflating one to check it for holes.
Q 22Which virus, best known for causing cold sores around the mouth, can also be passed on as a genital infection?
Herpes simplex
Herpes simplex sores were so widespread in ancient Rome that Emperor Tiberius is said to have banned kissing for a time.
Q 23Which STI, which can also infect the throat without causing symptoms, is colloquially known as 'the clap'?
Gonorrhea
Q 14Which Chicago gangster showed signs of syphilis attacking his brain soon after he was sent to federal prison?
Al Capone
Al Capone is thought to have caught the infection years earlier, while working as a bouncer in a brothel at the start of his criminal career.
Q 15Which antibiotic, introduced against syphilis in 1943, turned a feared lifelong infection into one cured by injection?
Penicillin
Penicillin sent syphilis rates tumbling in the 1940s, and a single injection of it is still the first-line treatment for an early infection.
Q 16Tom Hanks won a Best Actor Oscar for playing a lawyer fired for having AIDS in which 1993 film?
Philadelphia
Philadelphia was filmed on location in its namesake city, and Bruce Springsteen's title song for it won an Oscar as well.
Q 17Which annual campaign has men grow moustaches for a month to raise funds for testicular cancer and other health causes?
Movember
Movember joins 'mo', a slang word for a moustache, to the name of the month it runs in, and its foundation has staged the event since 2004.
Q 18Which gland, about the size of a walnut, sits just below a man's bladder and surrounds the urethra?
Prostate
The prostate makes part of the fluid in semen, and the alkalinity of semen helps sperm survive longer in the acidic vaginal tract.
Q 19Which American inventor's 1844 patent for vulcanized rubber led to the first rubber condoms eleven years later?
Charles Goodyear
Charles Goodyear is said to have hit on the process in 1839, when a mix of rubber and sulfur he accidentally heated hardened instead of melting.
Q 20World AIDS Day, observed around the globe every year since 1988, falls on the first day of which month?
December
December 1 was suggested by a former TV journalist, who reckoned news coverage would be greatest between the US elections and Christmas.
Gonorrhea in the throat produces no symptoms in about 90% of cases, so many people who carry it there never find out.
Q 24Trichomoniasis, an STI that causes no symptoms in about 70% of people, is caused by which kind of organism?
A parasite
A parasite called Trichomonas vaginalis is behind it, a single-celled protozoan that feeds on fragments of the cells it damages.
Q 25The pandemic strain of HIV is closely related to a virus found in which primates of Central African forests?
Chimpanzees
Chimpanzees in countries such as Cameroon and Gabon carry it, and one theory holds that a hunter was infected while butchering an animal.
Q 26Which Hollywood star helped found the AIDS research charity amfAR in 1985 and served as its founding national chairman?
Elizabeth Taylor
Elizabeth Taylor launched the effort with a $250,000 contribution from actor Rock Hudson, made shortly before his death from AIDS in October 1985.
Q 27Which childhood infection, known for swollen cheeks, can also inflame the testicles and occasionally reduce fertility?
Mumps
Mumps inflames the testes more often than any other part of the body outside the salivary glands, though lasting sterility is rare.
Q 28A US study that left hundreds of Black men untreated for syphilis from 1932 to 1972 is named after which Alabama city?
Tuskegee
Tuskegee's study ran for 40 years, and its exposure led to the Belmont Report and to laws requiring review boards to protect people who take part in research.
Q 29Research behind the HPV vaccine Gardasil began in 1991 with Jian Zhou and Ian Frazer at a university in which country?
Australia
Australia's University of Queensland was one of four institutions, the other three American, that went on to develop the vaccine in parallel.
Q 30The Pap smear, a screening test for cervical cancer, takes its name from a doctor born in which country?
Greece
Greece-born Georgios Papanikolaou relied on his wife Andromachi, who served as both his laboratory assistant and his research subject.