Smoking Trivia
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99 free Smoking trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Tobacco went from a sacred plant of the Americas to the world's leading cause of preventable death in about five centuries, and the story is full of oddities. This quiz covers the sailor jailed by the Inquisition for exhaling smoke, the king who taxed tobacco by 4,000 percent, the colony that used leaf as money, the sultan who banned it, the machine that made cigarettes cheap, and the scientists who finally proved what smoking does. It also takes in the brands and their marketing (Marlboro's London street, Lucky Strike's wartime pack, Joe Camel and Mickey Mouse), the milestone bans from Wellington's Old Government Building to Ireland's pubs, and the numbers behind modern public health: chemicals in smoke, deaths per year, plain packaging and price elasticity. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's articles on tobacco history, individual brands, smoking bans and the health science, so this set is safe to use for a pub quiz, a health class or a history round.
30 of 99 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Charred seeds in an ancient desert hearth show people in North America were using tobacco roughly how long ago?
12,000 years
12,000 years. The find, dated to about 12,300 years ago, pushed the record of tobacco use back by some 9,000 years, to a time when mammoths still roamed the continent.
Q 02Rodrigo de Jerez, credited as Europe's first smoker, picked up the habit in Cuba while sailing with which explorer?
Christopher Columbus
Christopher Columbus. He sent Jerez and an interpreter inland in November 1492, and they came back describing people who burned dried leaves and breathed in the smoke.
Q 03Under which monarch did the English take up smoking, which they at first called 'drinking' tobacco?
Elizabeth I
Elizabeth I. Colonists rescued from Roanoke came home in 1586 with the habit, and for years it was 'drunk': 'smoke' in that sense is first recorded only in 1604, in a pamphlet attacking it.
Q 04Which French ambassador to Portugal sent tobacco to the French court around 1560, promoting it as a medicine?
Jean Nicot
Jean Nicot. The court took to it after he reportedly used it on Catherine de' Medici's migraines; botanists then named the plant Nicotiana after him, and nicotine followed.
Q 05Which English king wrote 'A Counterblaste to Tobacco' in 1604?
James I
James I. He called smoking 'a custom loathsome to the eye, hateful to the nose, harmful to the brain, dangerous to the lungs', and likened its fumes to the smoke of hell.
Q 06England's king tried to price tobacco out of reach in 1604 by raising the import duty by roughly how much?
4,000%
4,000%. A further six shillings and eightpence was laid on every pound of leaf, yet the habit only spread, and the capital soon had thousands of tobacco sellers.
Q 07Which Jamestown settler first raised tobacco successfully as a cash crop, in 1612?
John Rolfe
John Rolfe. English smokers found Virginia's native leaf too bitter, so he planted milder Caribbean seed instead; he is better remembered today as the husband of Pocahontas.
Q 08In the Thirteen Colonies, tobacco served as what in trade with Native Americans?
Currency
The crop was so central that Virginia planters paid debts and even taxes in leaf.
Q 09Which Ottoman sultan banned smoking across his empire in the 1630s?
Murad IV
Murad IV. He had smokers put to death, but the ban barely outlived him: his successor lifted it and taxed tobacco instead.
Q 10Which cartoon characters were used to advertise Winston cigarettes in the early 1960s?
The Flintstones
The Flintstones. Fred and Barney lit up for the sponsor during the show's first two seasons; Winston then withdrew, and Welch's grape juice took its place.
Q 11The kiseru, a slender pipe with a tiny metal bowl for finely shredded tobacco, is traditional to which country?
Japan
Japan. Tobacco reached the country in the late 1500s, and the kiseru, often worked in precious metal as a status symbol, stayed the usual way to smoke until cigarettes arrived after 1868.
Q 12Which tobacco tycoon staked his business on the Bonsack cigarette-rolling machine in the 1880s?
James Buchanan Duke
James Buchanan Duke. A good hand-roller made a few cigarettes a minute and the machine well over a hundred; the fortune it earned him later endowed the university that bears his family's name.
Q 13Which baseball star's refusal to appear on a 1909 cigarette card made it the most famous card in the hobby?
Honus Wagner
Q 21Roughly how many different chemicals are found in tobacco smoke?
7,000
7,000. At least 69 of them are known to cause cancer, and several also turn up in products that have to carry warning labels, such as rat poison.
Q 22According to the World Health Organization, tobacco kills roughly how many people worldwide every year?
7 million
7 million. That is the WHO's estimate as of 2026, and it includes more than 1.6 million people who never smoked at all but breathed in other people's smoke.
Q 23Approximately how many cigarettes are smoked worldwide each year?
5.6 trillion
5.6 trillion. That is roughly 700 a year for every person on the planet, and the World Health Organization reckons that the remains of some 4.5 trillion of them are simply dropped.
Honus Wagner. Why he objected is disputed, since he chewed tobacco himself, but so few of the cards got out that one sold for more than $3 million in 2016.
Q 14In 1890 the five biggest US cigarette makers merged into which giant firm?
The American Tobacco Company
The American Tobacco Company. Within sixteen years it controlled four-fifths of the country's tobacco trade outside cigars, and in 1911 the Supreme Court ordered it broken up as a monopoly.
Q 15In 1929, publicist Edward Bernays had women light cigarettes in New York's Easter parade and called them what?
Torches of Freedom
Torches of Freedom. Bernays was working for the makers of Lucky Strike, who wanted to break the taboo on women smoking in public and so open up the other half of the market.
Q 16Which British researcher's 1950 BMJ paper linked smoking to lung cancer?
Richard Doll
Richard Doll. He and Austin Bradford Hill set out suspecting tarmac or car fumes; smoking proved to be the one thing their lung-cancer patients shared, and Doll gave up cigarettes himself.
Q 17Which country led the world in research linking smoking to lung cancer during the 1930s?
Germany
Germany. The findings fed the Nazi regime's bans on smoking in public places and on tobacco advertising, part of a campaign driven by its obsession with bodily purity.
Q 18The 1964 US Surgeon General's report called smoking only a 'habituation'; which word did the office finally use in the 1980s?
Addiction
Addiction. The 1964 committee hedged, partly because nicotine's hold on smokers was not yet understood, and it took a quarter of a century for a Surgeon General to say the word.
Q 19Starting on 2 January 1971, the US banned cigarette advertising in which media?
Television and radio
Television and radio. The ban began on 2 January rather than New Year's Day so that broadcasters could sell cigarette commercials during the college bowl games one last time.
Q 20Which country smokes more than two of every five cigarettes sold in the world?
China
China. As of 2022 its 300 million or so smokers were getting through well over two trillion cigarettes a year, in a country where a carton is still a welcome gift on almost any occasion.
Q 24The filters in cigarette butts are mostly made of what?
Plastic
Plastic. The fibres are cellulose acetate, which is slow to break down, so dropped butts pile up in gutters and on beaches, leaking the toxins they trapped.
Q 25Which country banned the sale of all tobacco products in 2004, thought to be a world first?
Bhutan
Bhutan. The Buddhist kingdom hoped to become a smoke-free nation, though tourists and diplomats were exempt; in 2021 its parliament made selling tobacco legal again.
Q 26Which country was first to put picture warnings on cigarette packs, in 2001?
Canada
Canada. Its sixteen warnings covered half of every pack, and one set a photograph of a diseased lung beside the line that 85% of lung cancers are caused by smoking.
Q 27Which country introduced the world's first nationwide smoking ban in workplaces and pubs, in 2004?
Ireland
Ireland. Publicans called the ban unenforceable and pubs across the border hoped to pick up the smokers, yet within little more than three years the whole United Kingdom had copied it.
Q 28Which cigarette brand, launched for women in 1968, used the slogan 'You've come a long way, baby'?
Virginia Slims
Virginia Slims. Its adverts borrowed the language of women's liberation, and from 1970 the brand also bankrolled the breakaway women's tennis circuit that grew into today's WTA Tour.
Q 29Which US state passed the first law restricting smoking in most public spaces, in 1975?
Minnesota
Minnesota. The state's doctors and a non-smokers' association lobbied the Clean Indoor Air Act into law, and it was widened again in 2007 by the Freedom to Breathe Act.
Q 30Australia's plain cigarette packs, introduced in December 2012, are what colour?
Olive drab
Olive drab. Researchers picked the murky shade as the least appealing they could find; officials first called it olive green, until the country's olive growers objected, and now say drab dark brown.