Supply Chain Trivia
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100 free Supply Chain trivia questions with answers — technology quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
42 free supply chain trivia questions with answers. Everything you own arrived by supply chain, and this quiz is about how. Forty-two questions cover the invention of the shipping container and the first voyage of the Ideal-X, why a twenty-foot container is not quite twenty feet, the Suez and Panama canals, the six days the Ever Given blocked world trade, and the origins of just-in-time, kanban and the Toyota Production System. There are questions on the first barcode ever scanned, the size of a standard pallet, the beer game and the bullwhip effect, Incoterms, bills of lading, FedEx's term-paper origin story, Maersk, the Port of Shanghai and where the words 'logistics' and 'supply chain' come from. It works for a team-building session, a logistics class or anyone who has ever wondered how a pack of gum gets to a shelf. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's articles on the topics, and each question carries the sentence that supports it.
30 of 100 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which American trucking magnate invented the modern intermodal shipping container?
Malcom McLean
He started with a single used truck in 1935 hauling empty tobacco barrels in North Carolina.
Q 02In April 1956 the converted tanker Ideal-X carried the first containers from Newark to which port?
Houston
It carried 58 35-foot 'trailer vans' along with its regular liquid cargo.
Q 03McLean's container line, originally Pan-Atlantic Steamship, was renamed what in 1960?
Sea-Land Service
In 1967 the US government invited it to run container service to South Vietnam, which produced 40% of its revenue.
Q 04Which engineer designed the twistlock and corner castings that lock shipping containers together?
Keith Tantlinger
McLean met him at Brown Trailers and hired him as vice-president of engineering and research.
Q 05Container ship capacity is measured in TEU. What does the T stand for?
Twenty-foot
A forty-foot box counts as two TEU, and 40-footers make up about 90% of container shipping.
Q 06A standard 20 ft box is actually a little short of 20 feet. Why?
So two sit neatly under one 40 ft box
Twistlocks on a ship leave a 3-inch gap between two 20-footers so a 40-footer fits precisely on top.
Q 07Roughly what share of the world's non-bulk cargo travels by container ship?
About 90%
Some 50,000 container ships do the work, the largest carrying more than 24,000 TEU.
Q 08In March 2021 the container ship Ever Given blocked which waterway for six days?
The Suez Canal
Egypt then impounded the ship while demanding a reported $916 million, including $300 million for 'loss of reputation'.
Q 09The Ever Given is operated by which Taiwanese shipping company?
Evergreen Marine
The ship itself is owned by a Japanese leasing firm and registered in Panama.
Q 10How long is the Ever Given?
About 400 metres
That makes it one of the longest ships in service, with a beam of nearly 59 metres.
Q 11The canal at Suez officially opened in which year?
1869
French diplomat Ferdinand de Lesseps had formed the Compagnie de Suez in 1858 to build it.
Q 12Which Egyptian leader nationalised the canal at Suez in July 1956, triggering an international crisis?
Gamal Abdel Nasser
Until then a mostly British- and French-owned company had operated it.
Q 13The locks of the Panama Canal lift ships 26 metres up to which artificial body of water?
Gatun Lake
The lake sits 26 metres above sea level; the French had tried and failed to dig a sea-level canal.
Which country took over the Panama Canal project from France in 1904 and opened it in 1914?
Q 21The bullwhip effect is also called the Forrester effect. Which 1961 Forrester book first described it?
Industrial Dynamics
Stanford researchers later popularised the term with a story about Volvo overproducing green cars.
Q 22The 'beer game', a classroom simulation of supply chain coordination, was invented at which university?
MIT
Jay Forrester created it at the Sloan School in 1960; players run a four-stage chain over 24 rounds.
Q 23The first item ever scanned with a UPC barcode at a checkout, in June 1974, was what?
A pack of Wrigley's Juicy Fruit gum
It happened at a Marsh supermarket in Troy, Ohio, and rang up 67 cents.
The Americans
Full Panamanian control did not arrive until noon on 31 December 1999.
Q 15Which two engineers developed the Toyota Production System between 1948 and 1975?
Taiichi Ohno and Eiji Toyoda
It was originally called 'just-in-time production' and became the model for lean manufacturing.
Q 16In the Toyota Production System, what is 'muda'?
Waste
Muri is overburden and mura is inconsistency; overproduction is considered the largest waste of all.
Q 17The kanban scheduling system takes its name from the Japanese word for what?
Signboard
Toyota borrowed the idea from studying how supermarkets restock shelves only as customers take goods.
Q 18The 'two bin system', ancestor of kanban, was first developed in UK factories building which aircraft?
Spitfire
An empty box is the simplest possible replenishment signal.
Q 19Who coined the term 'lean' production in a 1988 article?
John Krafcik
Womack and Jones later popularised it in The Machine that Changed the World and Lean Thinking.
Q 20The bullwhip effect describes what happening as you move upstream in a supply chain?
Order variability gets amplified
A 5% change in point-of-sale demand can be read as a 40% swing by the time it reaches manufacturers.
Q 24How many digits does a standard UPC-A barcode encode?
12
The related European EAN code has 13, and both are assigned by the GS1 organisation.
Q 25What are the dimensions of the standard North American GMA pallet?
48 by 40 inches
It was standardised by the Grocery Manufacturers Association and typically weighs 37 pounds.
Q 26Approximately how many wooden pallets did the US produce in 2025?
About 500 million
Pallet loss is a real industry headache, with millions going missing every year.
Q 27Incoterms, the standard trade terms like FOB and CIF, are published by which body?
The International Chamber of Commerce
The first edition came out in 1936, and Incoterms 2020 defines 11 rules.
Q 28How many rules does Incoterms 2020 define?
11
Seven of them can be used with any mode of transport and four are for sea and inland waterway only.
Q 29A bill of lading is a document issued by whom?
The carrier
It acknowledges receipt of cargo and, unlike an invoice or insurance policy, is negotiable.
Q 30The founder of FedEx first outlined the company's concept where?
In a Yale term paper
His professor reportedly did not think much of the idea for a network built around urgent deliveries.