Tricky Trivia
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49 free Tricky trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Tricky trivia questions are the ones your gut answers first, and wrongly. Which country has the most pyramids? Not Egypt. What is stored in a camel's hump? Not water. What colour is a black box, who or what is Frankenstein, and where were fortune cookies and Chinese checkers actually invented? Every question here is built around a common assumption or a familiar myth, so the fun is in catching yourself before you answer. The set mixes geography, science, history, animals, food and language, and it sits mostly in the medium range: nothing needs specialist knowledge, but everything rewards a second thought. It works well as a round for a pub quiz or family game night, because the arguments start the moment the answer is revealed. Difficulty is honest, so a few of the deeper cuts will catch even confident players. Every answer was checked against an encyclopaedia page and each question links its source, so when someone insists the Great Wall is visible from space, you can show them what NASA actually says.
30 of 49 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01What is the capital city of Australia?
Canberra
Canberra: the constitution put the capital in New South Wales but at least 100 miles from Sydney, so a new city was built, and Parliament sat in Melbourne until it moved there in 1927.
Q 02Which African country has more ancient pyramids than Egypt?
Sudan
Sudan: the kings of Kush, who ruled Egypt for a time as its 25th Dynasty, took up pyramid building at home, and their kingdom went on to raise more than 200 smaller, steeper tombs along the Nile.
Q 03How well does NASA say the naked eye can see the Great Wall from orbit?
Barely, and only in near-perfect conditions
Barely, and only in near-perfect conditions: the wall is built of local materials that match the land around it, and Yang Liwei, China's first astronaut, reported that he could not see it.
Q 04Where does the image of Vikings wearing horned helmets mostly come from?
19th-century opera costumes
19th-century opera costumes: designer Carl Emil Doepler put horns on the helmets when Wagner's Ring cycle was staged in the 1870s, and the look stuck, though no horned helmet from the Viking Age has ever been dug up.
Q 05Botanically speaking, the peanut is what kind of plant?
A legume
A legume, in the same family as peas and beans: once a peanut flower is fertilised, a stalk called a peg grows down into the soil, and the pod ripens underground.
Q 06Which of these fruits is a berry in the strict botanical sense?
Banana
Banana: to a botanist a berry is a fleshy fruit grown from the single ovary of one flower, so bananas, grapes and tomatoes qualify, while strawberries and raspberries are clusters of many tiny fruits.
Q 07In 1893 the US Supreme Court ruled that, for tariff purposes, the tomato is what?
A vegetable
A vegetable: the justices agreed that a tomato is botanically a fruit, but held that the tariff law spoke as ordinary people do, and people serve tomatoes with the main course, not as dessert.
Q 08Experiments show that a goldfish's memory is best measured in what?
Months
Months: goldfish fed at one side of a tank learn to wait there at mealtimes, and those taught a task can still repeat it months later, so the famous three-second memory is a myth.
Q 09Which of these is the largest desert on Earth?
Antarctica
Antarctica: a desert is defined by how little rain or snow falls, not by heat, and the frozen continent gets so little that it counts as one, about half as large again as the Sahara.
Q 10How did Albert Einstein actually perform in mathematics as a schoolboy?
He excelled well beyond his age
He excelled well beyond his age: by his own account Einstein had mastered calculus before he was fifteen, and he laughed when shown a 1935 Ripley's column claiming he had failed maths.
Q 11In Mary Shelley's novel, who or what is Frankenstein?
The scientist
The scientist: Victor Frankenstein is the university student who makes the creature, and in the novel that creature is no grunting brute but an eloquent giant who teaches himself to read Paradise Lost.
Q 12Strictly speaking, what is Big Ben?
The great bell
The great bell: the tower that houses it has a name of its own, and since 2012 that has been the Elizabeth Tower, chosen by MPs to mark Queen Elizabeth II's Diamond Jubilee.
Q 13What colour is an aircraft's 'black box' flight recorder?
Bright orange
Bright orange: the colour is there so that searchers can spot the recorder in wreckage, and for crashes at sea each unit also carries a beacon that signals from underwater.
Q 21Which Scarlett Johansson film is built on the myth that people use only 10% of their brains?
Lucy
Lucy: its poster claimed the average person uses 10% of their brain capacity, but neurologists say we use virtually every part of the brain, and most of it is active almost all the time.
Q 22What is the actual risk from the poinsettia, the red-leaved Christmas plant, to children and pets?
Essentially none
Essentially none: the plant's milky sap can irritate the mouth or upset the stomach, but poison experts say eating it has little if any effect beyond that, and it is not fatal.
Q 23The myth of lemming mass suicide was cemented by staged footage in a 1958 documentary from which studio?
Walt Disney
Q 14In which country was the board game Chinese checkers invented?
Germany
Germany: the game came out there in 1892 as Stern-Halma, named for its star-shaped board, and only became 'Chinese checkers' in 1928, when a version was sold under that name in America.
Q 15In Denmark, Norway and Sweden, the name for a Danish pastry translates as what?
Viennese bread
Viennese bread: the Scandinavian name, wienerbrød, points back to Vienna, while Austrians return the compliment and call the same pastry a Kopenhagener, after Copenhagen.
Q 16Fortune cookies, a US Chinese-restaurant staple, most likely came from immigrants from where?
Japan
Japan: a very similar folded cracker was being baked around Kyoto in the 1800s, and a Japanese gardener in San Francisco is said to have served the first American ones in the early 1900s.
Q 17The koala is often called a bear, but it is actually what kind of animal?
A marsupial
A marsupial: the newborn finishes growing in its mother's pouch, and adults doze for most of the day because the toxic eucalyptus leaves they live on give so little energy.
Q 18The orca, or killer whale, is the largest member of which family?
Oceanic dolphins
Oceanic dolphins: the orca is a toothed whale and the biggest member of the dolphin family, which also takes in the pilot whales despite their name.
Q 19Which planet has the hottest surface in the solar system?
Venus
Venus: its thick carbon-dioxide atmosphere traps heat in a runaway greenhouse effect, keeping the surface above 460 °C, hotter even than Mercury, which orbits far closer to the Sun.
Q 20What does a camel actually store in its hump?
Fat
Fat: the hump is a food reserve, not a water tank, and when a camel goes a long time without eating it burns through the store until the hump sags and flops to one side.
Walt Disney: for White Wilderness the crew set a small group of lemmings running on a turntable to fake a migration, then shoved them off a cliff to stage the plunge into the sea.
Q 24Legend wrongly credits Thomas Crapper with inventing what?
The flush toilet
The flush toilet: Crapper ran a London plumbing firm and took out nine patents, but none was for the toilet itself, and a flushing mechanism had been patented in 1775, decades before he was born.
Q 25Which work is the earliest known source of 'let them eat cake', usually pinned on Marie Antoinette?
Rousseau's Confessions
Rousseau's Confessions, written in the 1760s when Marie Antoinette was still a child, gives the line to an unnamed 'great princess', and what she tells the hungry poor to eat is brioche.
Q 26What did educated Europeans in Columbus's time generally believe about the shape of the Earth?
That it was a sphere
That it was a sphere: the real quarrel with Columbus was over the globe's size, which he badly underestimated, and the flat-Earth tale was spread centuries later by Washington Irving's 1828 biography of him.
Q 27How were the nineteen people executed as witches at Salem in 1692 put to death?
Hanged
Hanged: all nineteen died on the gallows and nobody was burned, though one more man, Giles Corey, was crushed to death under heavy stones for refusing to enter a plea.
Q 28Which US president is the only one to have spoken English as a second language?
Martin Van Buren
Martin Van Buren grew up speaking Dutch in Kinderhook, New York, and learned English at school, yet he was also the first president born a US citizen and not a British subject.
Q 29Bombay duck, a pungent dried delicacy of Anglo-Indian cooking, is what?
A fish
A fish: the bummalo, a lizardfish caught off Mumbai, is dried in the sun until pungent, then fried and crumbled over a meal as a condiment.
Q 30Guinea pigs, which are not pigs at all, were first domesticated where?
The Andes of South America
The Andes of South America: people there bred guinea pigs for meat long before Europeans made pets of them, and households in Peru, Ecuador and Bolivia still raise them for the table.