Snow
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6correct to beat the crowd
This snow trivia quiz has 98 free questions with answers and covers the science and the culture of snow. There are questions on how snowflakes form and why they are six-sided, why snow looks white when ice is clear, record snowfalls from Mount Baker to Aomori, historic blizzards and avalanches, and snow in surprising places like the Sahara. Then it turns to snowmen (including the one Michelangelo built), snow globes, igloos, snow angels, skiing and snowboarding, and snow animals like the snow leopard and snowy owl. About a third of the questions are easy enough for a classroom or a snow-day family quiz, a third are medium, and the rest will test people who think they know winter. Nothing here is violent or adult. Every answer has been checked against a primary or encyclopaedic source, and each question links to the page that confirms it.
30 of 98 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Snow crystals form when tiny supercooled cloud droplets freeze around what?
Atmospheric particles
Atmospheric particles such as dust give each droplet something to freeze onto, which is why cloud seeding releases silver iodide particles to try to coax out more snow.
Q 02Ice is clear, so why does snow look white?
Light scatters off the crystal facets and imperfections
Light scatters off the crystal facets and imperfections, bouncing every colour back about equally, which is the same reason a pile of crushed glass looks white.
Q 03What mainly decides the shape a falling snowflake grows into?
Temperature and humidity
Temperature and humidity shift along each flake's fall and alter how water molecules attach, which is why no two snowflakes are likely to grow exactly alike.
Q 04Which Vermont farmer began photographing snowflakes under a microscope in 1885, revealing their variety?
Wilson Bentley
Wilson Bentley, nicknamed 'Snowflake' Bentley, died of pneumonia in 1931, which he may have caught while walking home through a snowstorm.
Q 05What gives the pink 'watermelon snow' seen on summer mountains its colour?
Algae
Algae that thrive in the cold carry a red pigment, and by darkening the snow they help it melt faster around them.
Q 06Whose 1611 paper 'On the six-cornered snowflake' first stated a conjecture on stacking spheres?
Johannes Kepler
Johannes Kepler wrote it as a New Year's gift, and his hunch that spheres stacked like cannonballs pack most tightly was only formally proved, by computer, in 2014.
Q 07The world's largest snowflake, 38 cm across per Guinness, fell in 1887 in which US state?
Montana
Montana's giant flake is only a claim: it lies far outside the few-inch widths reliably documented for other big flakes.
Q 08The 1,140-inch single-season snowfall record of 1998-99 was set at a ski area named after which mountain?
Mount Baker
Mount Baker gave the ski area its name, but the resort sits about 9 miles from the volcano itself, closer to neighbouring Mount Shuksan.
Q 09Which city at the northern tip of Honshu topped AccuWeather's 2016 ranking of the world's snowiest major cities?
Aomori
Aomori is buried each winter because frigid Siberian winds cross the warmer sea, gather moisture and then drop it as heavy snow over the coast and mountains.
Q 10What does a US storm need to be classed as a blizzard?
Strong wind and poor visibility
Strong wind and poor visibility define it: winds of 35 mph or more and visibility under a quarter mile for at least 3 hours, even if the snow is only blowing, not falling.
Q 11The Great Blizzard of 1888 helped push which city to build America's first underground subway?
Boston
Boston opened the nation's first subway in 1897, and the same storm that cut the region's telegraph lines also pushed cities to bury their wires underground.
Q 12At JFK's 1961 inauguration, glare off fresh snow stopped which poet from reading his new poem?
Robert Frost
Robert Frost, then 86, could not make out his typed pages, so he recited 'The Gift Outright', a poem published years earlier, from memory instead.
Q 13Which type of avalanche causes most avalanche deaths?
Slab avalanches
Slab avalanches break away as a cohesive block, and in about 90 percent of avalanche incidents the victim or someone in their party triggers the slide.
Q 21The Austrian who patented the snow globe, Erwin Perzy, was originally trying to build what?
A brighter surgical lamp
A brighter surgical lamp was his aim, but the particles he added to a water-filled glass globe drifted like falling snow, so he put a small model of Mariazell's basilica inside.
Q 22Which 1941 film opens with its dying protagonist dropping a snow globe as he whispers 'Rosebud'?
Citizen Kane
Citizen Kane never lets its reporter find out what Rosebud means, but the final scene shows the audience the name on the childhood sled Kane had been playing on, as it burns.
Q 23What makes snow a good material for keeping an igloo warm?
Q 14In December 1916, avalanches buried soldiers in the Alps on the World War I front between Austria-Hungary and which country?
Italy
Italy's front with Austria-Hungary ran through high mountains, and some reports say both sides fired shells into the heavy snow on purpose to bury the enemy.
Q 15The deadliest avalanche in US history killed 96 people in 1910 in the town of Wellington in which state?
Washington
Washington's railway town of Wellington was quietly renamed Tye afterwards, as the Great Northern Railway tried to bury the bad publicity along with the disaster.
Q 16In December 2016, photos showed snow on orange dunes near Aïn Séfra in which desert?
The Sahara
The Sahara meets the Atlas Mountains at Aïn Séfra, where winter nights can fall below freezing, yet the rare 2016 snow on its dunes melted within about a day.
Q 17In the harsh winter of 1511, which city was filled with more than 100 snow sculptures, many of them satirical?
Brussels
Brussels was so full of snow figures, caricatures among them, that the town poet Jan Smeken wrote a poem describing them.
Q 18Which Renaissance artist was commissioned by Piero de' Medici to build a snowman in 1494?
Michelangelo
Michelangelo had gone home to his father's house after Lorenzo de' Medici died, and the snow statue commissioned by Lorenzo's heir Piero brought him back to the Medici court.
Q 19The world's tallest snow figure, a 122-foot snowwoman named Olympia, was built in 2008 in Bethel, in which state?
Maine
Maine's senator Olympia Snowe gave the snowwoman her name, and she outgrew Angus, the town's 1999 record snowman named for Governor Angus King.
Q 20What brings Frosty the Snowman to life in the 1950 song?
Silk hat
A silk hat the children place on his head brings him to life, and the song was written to follow Gene Autry's huge 1949 success with 'Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer'.
Trapped air pockets make it an insulator
Trapped air pockets make it an insulator, and builders could briefly heat the inside with a lamp so the walls melted slightly and refroze into a strengthening layer of ice.
Q 24In the Inuit languages, the word iglu can refer to what?
A home of any material
A home of any material can be an iglu, because the word simply means 'house', but English borrowed it only for the dome built from blocks of snow.
Q 25On which US state's capitol grounds was the record for most simultaneous snow angels (8,962) set in 2007?
North Dakota
North Dakota was winning its own record back: the state set the first mark in 2002, lost it to a university crowd in 2006, then answered with 8,962 people in Bismarck.
Q 26The word 'ski' goes back to an Old Norse word that literally meant what?
Stick of wood
Stick of wood was the literal sense of Old Norse skíð, and the early English spelling 'skee' lives on in Skee-Ball, the arcade game named for its ski-jump ramp.
Q 27The first Winter Olympic Games were held in 1924 in which French town?
Chamonix
Chamonix staged it as an 'International Winter Sports Week', and only afterwards did the IOC decide, in retrospect, to count the event as the first Winter Olympics.
Q 28Snowboarding became an official Olympic sport at which Winter Games?
Nagano 1998
Nagano 1998 crowned snowboarding's first Olympic champion, Canada's Ross Rebagliati, who then nearly lost his gold medal after testing positive for marijuana.
Q 29The Snurfer, the snowboard's forerunner, was invented in 1965 in Muskegon, in which state?
Michigan
Michigan's Sherman Poppen strapped two skis together to entertain his daughters on Christmas Day, and snurfer Jake Burton Carpenter later improved the design.
Q 30What does a sleeping snow leopard use as a blanket against the cold?
Its thick tail
Its thick tail does double duty: besides serving as a blanket in the cold, it helps the cat balance on the steep, rocky slopes where it hunts.