Statistics Trivia
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8correct to beat the crowd
110 free Statistics trivia questions with answers — science & nature quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
46 free Statistics trivia questions with answers. Statistics runs everything from election forecasts to drug trials, and this quiz tests whether you know how it works and where it came from. Forty-six questions cover the basics (mean, median, mode, standard deviation, z-scores), the big ideas (the normal distribution, the central limit theorem, Bayes' theorem, p-values) and the stories behind them: the Guinness brewer who invented the t-test, Florence Nightingale's rose diagrams, Abraham Wald's bullet-riddled bombers and the magazine poll that got 1936 spectacularly wrong. Easy questions ask which letter stands for standard deviation and how many people you need for a shared birthday; hard ones want the Prussian horse-kick data, Anscombe's quartet and the size of Gallup's 1936 sample. Ideal for students, teachers, data people and anyone who enjoyed the Monty Hall argument. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's articles on the concepts and their inventors, and each question carries the sentence that backs it up.
30 of 110 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which 18th-century German scholar gave the field its name, Statistik?
Gottfried Achenwall
Gottfried Achenwall, a Göttingen professor, used the word Statistik in 1749 for the systematic description of a state's affairs, and the name stuck as the field turned mathematical.
Q 02Which measure of central tendency is the middle value when data are sorted?
The median
The median is the middle value of sorted data; it resists distortion by a few huge values, which is why median income describes a typical household better than mean income.
Q 03What is the 'mode' of a data set?
The value that appears most often
The value that appears most often is the mode; a data set can have two modes (bimodal) or none at all if every value occurs just once.
Q 04Which Greek letter is conventionally used for standard deviation?
Sigma (σ)
Sigma (σ) denotes the population standard deviation; a low sigma means data cluster tightly around the mean, while a high sigma means they are spread out.
Q 05In a normal distribution, roughly what percentage of values fall within one standard deviation?
68%
68%: about 68% of values in a normal distribution lie within one standard deviation of the mean, and about 99.7% lie within three.
Q 06The normal distribution is also named after which mathematician?
Carl Friedrich Gauss
Carl Friedrich Gauss gave the normal distribution its other name, the Gaussian, after using it in 1809 to model measurement errors in astronomy.
Q 07What does the central limit theorem say about the spread of sample means?
They tend toward a normal curve as samples grow
They tend toward a normal curve as samples grow: the central limit theorem says the distribution of sample means approaches normality whatever the population's shape, which is why normal-based methods work on non-normal data.
Q 08Which law says the average of many independent samples converges to the true expected value?
Large numbers law
Large numbers law, better known as the law of large numbers, is why casinos win in the long run: over thousands of spins the average result settles at the expected value.
Q 09The t-distribution used for small samples was invented by a statistician working for which company?
Guinness
Guinness employed William Sealy Gosset at its Dublin brewery, where he devised the t-distribution to judge small samples of barley and stout; the firm made him publish under a pseudonym.
Q 10Under what pen name did William Sealy Gosset publish his t-distribution work?
Student
Student was the pen name Gosset used for his 1908 paper 'The Probable Error of a Mean', which introduced the t-distribution for small samples.
Q 11Who founded the world's first university statistics department, at University College London in 1911?
Karl Pearson
Karl Pearson founded the Department of Applied Statistics at University College London in 1911, the world's first university statistics department, and also coined the term 'histogram'.
Q 12Which statistician developed analysis of variance (ANOVA) while analysing crop data at Rothamsted?
Ronald Fisher
Ronald Fisher developed analysis of variance during his years at Rothamsted Experimental Station (1919-1933), where he analysed decades of crop-yield records.
Q 13Which threshold did the man behind ANOVA popularise as 'convenient' for judging statistical significance?
P = 0.05
Q 21Who introduced the box-and-whisker plot in 1970?
John Tukey
John Tukey introduced the box-and-whisker plot in 1970 and popularised it in his 1977 book Exploratory Data Analysis; the box spans the middle half of the data.
Q 22What is the interquartile range?
The difference between the 75th and 25th percentiles
The difference between the 75th and 25th percentiles is the interquartile range; because it ignores the tails, it is a robust measure of spread unaffected by outliers.
Q 23A z-score tells you how many of what a value lies above or below the mean?
Standard deviations
P = 0.05, or 1 in 20, was the level called 'convenient' in the 1925 book Statistical Methods for Research Workers, and it became the default cut-off for significance.
Q 14A p-value is the probability of results at least as extreme as those observed, assuming what is true?
The null hypothesis
The null hypothesis is what a p-value assumes: it gives the probability of data at least this extreme if the null were true, which the ASA's 2016 statement stressed is not the probability the hypothesis is true.
Q 15Who developed the statistical concept of correlation and promoted 'regression toward the mean'?
Francis Galton
Francis Galton hit on regression through his 1875 sweet-pea breeding experiments and introduced the correlation coefficient in 1888, an idea later formalised by his protégé.
Q 16What does 'regression toward the mean' predict about an extreme measurement?
The next one is likely to be closer to average
The next one is likely to be closer to average: an extreme score mixes skill with luck, and the luck rarely repeats, which is why the 'Sports Illustrated cover jinx' needs no curse.
Q 17Bayes' theorem lets you calculate the probability of a cause given what?
Its effect
Its effect: Bayes' theorem inverts conditional probability, turning the likelihood of an effect given a cause into the probability of the cause given its effect, updating a prior belief with evidence.
Q 18Who is called the founder of demography for his 1660s study of London's mortality bills?
John Graunt
John Graunt, a London haberdasher, published Natural and Political Observations on the Bills of Mortality in 1662 and built the first crude life table from them.
Q 19Which nursing pioneer was also a statistical innovator, famous for her polar area (rose) diagrams?
Florence Nightingale
Florence Nightingale drew her polar area diagrams in 1858 to show that disease, not wounds, killed most British soldiers in the Crimean War.
Q 20Who is credited with inventing the pie chart, in his 1801 Statistical Breviary?
William Playfair
William Playfair, a Scottish engineer, had already introduced line and bar charts in his 1786 Commercial and Political Atlas before drawing the first pie charts in 1801.
Standard deviations: a z-score is the value minus the mean, divided by the standard deviation, so z = 2 means two standard deviations above the mean.
Q 24Which name is given to a trend that appears in several groups but reverses when the groups are combined?
Simpson's
Simpson's paradox: the classic example is UC Berkeley's 1973 graduate admissions, which looked biased against women overall but not within individual departments.
Q 25How many people are needed in a room for a better-than-even chance that two share a birthday?
23
With 23 people there are 253 possible pairs, which is why the odds climb so fast.
Q 26In the Monty Hall problem, what should the contestant do after the host reveals a goat?
Switch doors
Switch doors: switching wins the car two-thirds of the time, because the first pick is right only one time in three and the host's reveal moves the remaining odds to the other door.
Q 27Which columnist's 1990 answer to the Monty Hall problem drew thousands of angry letters?
Marilyn vos Savant
Marilyn vos Savant answered the problem in her Parade 'Ask Marilyn' column in 1990; the puzzle had first been posed by Steve Selvin in The American Statistician in 1975.
Q 28According to Benford's law, about how often is 1 the leading digit in real-world numerical data?
30%
30%: Benford's law puts the leading digit 1 at about 30% of entries (log10 2 ≈ 0.301), a pattern Simon Newcomb spotted in worn logarithm tables in 1881.
Q 29Which magazine's 1936 poll of ten million people wrongly predicted Alf Landon would beat FDR?
The Literary Digest
The Literary Digest mailed ten million ballots drawn from its subscribers plus car and telephone lists, a sample skewed to the better-off, and folded within two years of the fiasco.
Q 30How large a sample did the American Institute of Public Opinion use for the 1936 election?
50,000
50,000: the American Institute of Public Opinion polled roughly 50,000 people chosen by quota sampling and correctly forecast Roosevelt's win, while a far larger mail-in poll got it wrong.