60 free Statistics trivia questions with answers — science & nature quiz, new questions added Aug 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 60 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01The word 'statistics' comes from a German word originally meaning the description of what?
A state or country
Statistik described the affairs of a state; today the field covers collecting, analysing and presenting any data.
Q 02Which measure of central tendency is the middle value when data are sorted?
The median
It resists distortion by a few huge values, which is why median income beats mean income for describing a typical household.
Q 03What is the 'mode' of a data set?
The value that appears most often
In a perfect normal distribution the mode, median and mean all coincide.
Q 04Which Greek letter is conventionally used for standard deviation?
Sigma (σ)
A low value means data cluster tightly around the mean; a high value means they are spread out.
Q 05In a normal distribution, roughly what percentage of values fall within one standard deviation?
68%
The 68-95-99.7 rule extends the idea to two and three times the spread.
Q 06The normal distribution is also named after which mathematician?
Carl Friedrich Gauss
Its symmetric shape earned the informal name 'bell curve', though other distributions are bell-shaped too.
Q 07What does the central limit theorem say about the spread of sample means?
They tend toward a normal curve as samples grow
That is why so many statistical methods built for normal data work on non-normal data.
Q 08Which law says the average of many independent samples converges to the true expected value?
Large numbers law
It is why casinos win in the long run despite losing individual spins.
Q 09The t-distribution used for small samples was invented by a statistician working for which company?
Guinness
William Sealy Gosset published as 'Student' because the brewery worried rivals would learn its secrets.
Q 10Under what pen name did brewer-statistician William Sealy Gosset publish?
Student
His 1907 paper on counting cells with a haemocytometer independently rediscovered the Poisson distribution.
Q 11Who founded the world's first university statistics department, at University College London in 1911?
Karl Pearson
He also coined the term 'histogram' in his 1892 lectures and, less happily, championed eugenics.
Q 12Which statistician developed analysis of variance (ANOVA) while analysing crop data at Rothamsted?
Ronald Fisher
He has been called the single most important figure in 20th-century statistics.
Q 13Which threshold did the man behind ANOVA popularise as 'convenient' for judging statistical significance?
P = 0.05
He noted that P = 0.05, or 1 in 20, corresponds to about 1.96 standard deviations.
Q 21Who introduced the box-and-whisker plot in 1970?
John Tukey
The box shows the interquartile range; the whiskers reach out toward the extremes.
Q 22What is the interquartile range?
The difference between the 75th and 25th percentiles
It ignores outliers, which makes it a robust measure of spread.
Q 23A z-score tells you how many of what a value lies above or below the mean?
Standard deviations
Subtract the mean and divide by the standard deviation to get it.
Q 14A p-value is the probability of results at least as extreme as those observed, assuming what is true?
The null hypothesis
The American Statistical Association warned in 2016 that p-values do not measure the probability that a hypothesis is true.
Q 15Who developed the statistical concept of correlation and promoted 'regression toward the mean'?
Francis Galton
His sweet-pea experiments and 'bean machine' led him to the idea in the 1870s and 1880s.
Q 16What does 'regression toward the mean' predict about an extreme measurement?
The next one is likely to be closer to average
It explains why the 'Sports Illustrated cover jinx' needs no curse.
Q 17Bayes' theorem lets you calculate the probability of a cause given what?
Its effect
Bayes was a Presbyterian minister; Richard Price edited his essay and read it to the Royal Society in 1763.
Q 18Who is called the founder of demography for his 1660s study of London's mortality bills?
John Graunt
Graunt was a haberdasher by trade and produced the first life table.
Q 19Which nursing pioneer was also a statistical innovator, famous for her polar area (rose) diagrams?
Florence Nightingale
Her charts showed that disease, not wounds, killed most soldiers in the Crimean War.
Q 20Who is credited with inventing the pie chart, in his 1801 Statistical Breviary?
William Playfair
The Scottish engineer had already introduced the line and bar chart in 1786, and may have been a British spy.
Q 24Which name is given to a trend that appears in several groups but reverses when the groups are combined?
Simpson's
The classic example is UC Berkeley's 1973 graduate admissions, which looked biased against women overall but not by department.
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
Switching wins the car two-thirds of the time; about 10,000 readers, nearly 1,000 with PhDs, wrote to tell the columnist she was wrong.
Q 27Which columnist's 1990 answer to the Monty Hall problem drew thousands of angry letters?
Marilyn vos Savant
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%
Forensic accountants use it to sniff out faked figures; astronomer Simon Newcomb noticed it 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
It sampled its own readers plus car and telephone owners; George Gallup got it right with just 50,000 people.
Q 30How large a sample did the American Institute of Public Opinion use to call the 1936 election within 1.4%?
50,000
The lesson stuck: a representative sample beats a huge biased one.