Temperature Trivia
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99 free Temperature trivia questions with answers — science & nature quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
This temperature trivia quiz measures everything from the everyday to the extreme. It covers the scales (Celsius's upside-down original, Fahrenheit's salt-and-ice zero, Réaumur's 80-degree boil, Rankine and kelvin), the world records at Death Valley and Vostok Station, the decertified Libyan reading, and what counts as normal, feverish and hypothermic in the human body. It also digs into how we measure heat at all: Galen's degrees, Santorio's scaled thermoscope, the brandy-filled sealed tube of 1629, the Florentine academy behind the Galileo thermometer, Six's max-min design, thermocouples and infrared sensors, and the 2019 switch to defining the kelvin by the Boltzmann constant. The final stretch visits negative temperatures, the 38-picokelvin record, lightning at 30,000 °C and the Planck limit. Early questions are approachable; later ones will test serious science fans. Every answer was checked against encyclopaedia entries before publishing.
30 of 99 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01At what Fahrenheit reading does water boil at sea level?
212 °F
212 °F holds only at sea level: the boiling point falls by just under 1 °F for every 500 feet climbed, which is why food takes longer to cook in the mountains.
Q 02Which of these, like the kelvin, is one of the seven SI base units?
Kilogram
The kilogram. For more than a century it was defined by a platinum-iridium cylinder kept in a vault near Paris; since 2019 it has been fixed by a constant of nature instead, as the kelvin is.
Q 03Which everyday point is 273.15 on the Kelvin scale?
Water's freezing point
Water's freezing point, 0 °C. A kelvin is the same size as a degree Celsius, so converting between the two only shifts the zero by 273.15, down to the coldest temperature possible.
Q 04What was the Celsius scale generally called before it was renamed in 1948?
Centigrade
Centigrade, from the Latin for 'hundred', was dropped in 1948 partly because in French the same word named a hundredth of a grade, a unit of angle; the scale took Anders Celsius's name instead.
Q 05As of 2025, which American valley holds the official record for Earth's highest air temperature?
Death Valley
Death Valley. Furnace Creek hit 56.7 °C (134 °F) on 10 July 1913; the valley floor lies below sea level between steep mountain walls, so heated air sinks back down and is trapped instead of escaping.
Q 06Ray Bradbury's novel Fahrenheit 451 takes its title from the temperature at which what is said to catch fire?
Paper
Paper. The title page calls 451 °F 'the temperature at which book paper catches fire and burns', but in tests paper ignites anywhere from about 424 to 475 °F.
Q 07As of 2025, where was Earth's lowest directly measured air temperature recorded?
Vostok Station, Antarctica
Vostok Station, Antarctica. The then-Soviet base logged −89.2 °C on 21 July 1983, in the depths of the polar night and nearly 3,500 m up on the ice sheet.
Q 08Which planet has the hottest surface in the Solar System, even though another orbits closer to the Sun?
Venus
Venus. Its thick atmosphere traps heat in a runaway greenhouse effect, holding the surface at about 465 °C, hot enough to melt lead.
Q 09Which Siberian settlement recorded −67.7 °C in February 1933?
Oymyakon
Soviet texts cited it as a record low through the 1940s, narrowly beating nearby Verkhoyansk.
Q 10The louvred box that shades weather-station thermometers was designed by a lighthouse engineer, the father of which Scottish author?
Robert Louis Stevenson
Robert Louis Stevenson. His father Thomas designed the Stevenson screen; the son trained for the family trade of lighthouse engineering, then gave it up to write.
Q 11Carl Wunderlich fixed 'normal' body temperature at 37 °C in 1868 from readings taken where on about 25,000 patients?
Armpit
The armpit. Infections such as tuberculosis were rife among his patients, one reason researchers think his famous average ran a little warmer than healthy people do today.
Q 12Which part of the brain acts as the body's thermostat, holding its core near 37 °C?
The hypothalamus
The hypothalamus. A fever is this thermostat turning its own set point up, which is why you shiver and feel cold while your temperature is actually climbing.
Q 13'Paradoxical undressing', stripping off while freezing, is a late sign of which condition?
Hypothermia
Q 21What mixture originally defined 0 °F?
Salt and ice
Salt and ice: a slush of ice, water and the salt ammonium chloride settles at one steady low temperature, and Fahrenheit took that as the zero of his scale.
Q 22Dry ice, which sits at about −78 °C, is the frozen form of which gas?
Carbon dioxide
Carbon dioxide. At normal pressure dry ice never melts into a puddle: it turns straight from solid to gas, which is why theatres use it in fog machines.
Q 23Which liquid did Fahrenheit adopt in place of alcohol for his reliable thermometers?
Mercury
Mercury. Fahrenheit's instruments agreed with one another so well that observers in different places could compare readings, and their popularity spread his temperature scale with them.
Hypothermia. It sets in once core temperature falls below 35 °C, and in its late stages a sudden feeling of warmth is thought to make confused victims undress, which only speeds their heat loss.
Q 14Which heat illness, with a core temperature above 40 °C, is a medical emergency?
Heat stroke
Heat stroke. The body can no longer control its own temperature, which keeps rising; fever drugs such as aspirin don't help, and rapid cooling is the treatment.
Q 15When in the daily cycle is human body temperature typically at its lowest?
Late in the night's sleep
Late in the night's sleep, typically around 4 to 5 a.m. The body clock then starts warming you up before you wake, and your temperature peaks in the late afternoon.
Q 16Which law of thermodynamics, named as an afterthought in the 1930s, underpins the very idea of temperature?
The zeroth law
The zeroth law says two bodies each in thermal balance with a third are in balance with each other, which is what lets a thermometer work; the other laws were already numbered, so it had to go in front.
Q 17Temperature is, at heart, a measure of the average what of the particles in a substance?
Kinetic energy
Kinetic energy. Hotter simply means the atoms and molecules are jiggling faster, which is why there is a coldest possible temperature: the point where that motion can be reduced no further.
Q 18Which metal has the highest melting point of all, the reason it was used for light-bulb filaments?
Tungsten
Tungsten melts only at about 3,400 °C, so a filament could glow white-hot without melting; even so, old-style bulbs turned far more of their power into heat than into light.
Q 19Which way round did Anders Celsius originally number his temperature scale?
Boiling at 0, freezing at 100
Boiling at 0, freezing at 100: by modern eyes his 1742 scale ran upside down. It was turned round within a few years, around the time he died in 1744, with the botanist Carl Linnaeus among those credited.
Q 20Fahrenheit adapted his thermometer and scale from which Danish astronomer?
Ole Rømer
Ole Rømer, the first to measure the speed of light, showed Fahrenheit his thermometers in Copenhagen in 1708; Fahrenheit later multiplied Rømer's numbers by four to get rid of awkward fractions.
Q 24Heating milk to about 72 °C for 15 seconds, enough to kill germs without cooking it, is a process named after whom?
Louis Pasteur
Louis Pasteur. He worked out the gentle-heat method in the 1860s to stop French wine from spoiling, and only later was it turned on milk.
Q 25In the early 1600s, inventors such as Santorio Santorio turned the thermoscope into a true thermometer by adding what?
A numbered scale
A numbered scale. A thermoscope only showed warmer or colder, whereas with marks to read off the physician Santorio could put a figure on his patients' heat; who added one first, he or Galileo's circle, was never settled.
Q 26The zone around a star where a planet could hold liquid water is nicknamed after which storybook character?
Goldilocks
Goldilocks. Like her porridge, a planet there is neither too hot nor too cold but 'just right' for liquid water on its surface, which is why planet hunters prize worlds found in a star's habitable zone.
Q 27Sir James Dewar's 1892 invention for storing liquefied gases is now a household item under which brand name?
Thermos
Thermos. Dewar never patented his vacuum flask, so when the Thermos company began selling it he lost his court case and made nothing from an invention found in every picnic bag.
Q 28Which liquefied gas, boiling at −196 °C, do doctors use to freeze off warts?
Nitrogen
Nitrogen. It makes up most of the air around us, yet as a liquid it is cold enough to freeze the wart's cells, which then die and drop away.
Q 29Which metal, used in LEDs, melts at about 30 °C, low enough to turn liquid in the palm of your hand?
Gallium
Gallium. Its melting point, 29.76 °C, is so dependable that it serves as one of the official fixed points used to calibrate the world's thermometers.
Q 30Which element has the lowest boiling point of all, turning to gas at just four degrees above absolute zero?
Helium
Helium. It boils at about −269 °C, and at normal pressure it never freezes solid however cold it gets; only squeezing it as well can turn it into ice.