Trivia Facts
0Loading crowd target
0Loading crowd target
7correct to beat the crowd
130 free Trivia Facts trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Seventy-four trivia facts that sound made up and are not, each turned into a four-option question so you can test yourself instead of just nodding along. Venus has a day longer than its year. Bananas are mildly radioactive. Nintendo is older than the zipper. A tsar taxed beards. Sherlock Holmes never says the one line everyone quotes. The first webcam existed to watch a coffee pot. The set is deliberately random: science, animals, history, geography, food, sport, technology, film and TV, music, books and the human body, with no more than a handful from any one area. It works as a fun facts round for a pub quiz or family night, a stash of icebreakers, or ten minutes of "wait, really?" on your phone. Difficulty is mixed, and there is no filler. Every fact was checked against the relevant Wikipedia article and the sentence that supports it is stored with the question, so if someone at the table refuses to believe the flamingo one you can show them.
30 of 130 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which food, properly stored, essentially never spoils, with samples from ancient tombs still edible?
Honey
Honey keeps almost indefinitely: its low water content, high sugar concentration and acidity stop microbes growing, which is why archaeologists have found sealed jars of honey in Egyptian tombs still edible.
Q 02On which planet does a single day (one rotation) last longer than its year?
Venus
Venus takes about 243 Earth days to spin once on its axis but only about 225 to circle the Sun, so its day outlasts its year; it also spins retrograde.
Q 03Which everyday fruit is radioactive enough to serve as an informal unit of radiation dose?
Banana
The 'banana equivalent dose' comes from naturally occurring potassium-40, and eating one is worth roughly 0.1 microsieverts.
Q 04The air around a lightning bolt heats to roughly what temperature?
30,000 °C
A lightning channel heats the surrounding air to roughly 30,000 °C, about five times the temperature of the Sun's surface; the air's explosive expansion is what we hear as thunder.
Q 05On a hot day, the top of the Eiffel Tower can lean away from the sun by up to how much?
18 cm
Heat makes the sunlit side of the Eiffel Tower's iron expand more than the shaded side, so the whole tower bends away from the sun, its top shifting by up to 18 cm.
Q 06Which microscopic animals have survived direct exposure to the vacuum of outer space?
Tardigrades
Tardigrades, also called water bears, survived ten days exposed to open space on the 2007 FOTON-M3 mission; they curl into a dried-out 'tun' state that shrugs off vacuum, radiation and near-absolute-zero cold.
Q 07Which planet is the only one in the Solar System less dense than water?
Saturn
Saturn's average density is about 0.69 grams per cubic centimetre, below water's 1.0, so in a big enough bathtub it would in theory float; every other planet is denser than water.
Q 08Which planet's position was worked out mathematically before anyone had knowingly seen it?
Neptune
Neptune's position was calculated by Urbain Le Verrier, and independently John Couch Adams, from wobbles in Uranus's orbit; Johann Galle found Neptune within a degree of Le Verrier's prediction in September 1846.
Q 09Pluto, discovered in 1930, will complete its first full orbit since its discovery in which year?
2178
Pluto's orbit takes about 248 Earth years, so having been discovered in 1930 it completes its first full circuit since then in 2178, nearly a quarter-millennium after Clyde Tombaugh spotted it.
Q 10If all the gold ever mined were melted into a single cube, roughly how long would each side be?
About 22 metres
All the gold ever mined would form a cube only about 22 metres on each side; gold is so dense, 19.3 tonnes per cubic metre, that the whole historic total fits comfortably inside a stadium.
Q 11Up to how long can a sloth hold its breath underwater?
40 minutes
A sloth can hold its breath for up to 40 minutes by slowing an already sluggish heart rate to less than a third of normal; sloths are surprisingly capable swimmers.
Q 12What gives flamingos their pink colour?
Their food
Their food does it: flamingo chicks hatch grey and turn pink from carotenoid pigments in the algae and brine shrimp they eat, which is why zoo birds fade without supplements.
Q 13To stop themselves drifting out to sea while resting, sea otters wrap themselves in what?
Kelp
Sea otters wrap themselves in strands of kelp before sleeping so they do not drift off; mothers also wrap their pups in kelp while diving for food, and the pup cries if it wakes alone.
Q 21Which birds cannot move their eyes at all and must turn their whole head instead?
Owls
Owls' eyes are fixed in bony tubes called sclerotic rings, so they cannot swivel them; instead extra neck vertebrae let an owl turn its head most of the way round.
Q 22Where are a butterfly's taste receptors located?
On its feet
A female uses them to test whether a leaf will feed her caterpillars before she lays eggs on it.
Q 23Which university's teaching is first documented in 1096, making it older than the Aztec Empire?
Oxford
Oxford has evidence of teaching from 1096, making it the oldest university in the English-speaking world; the Aztec Empire, by contrast, was founded in 1428.
Q 14Which bird's wing structure allows helicopter-like flight in any direction, including backwards and hovering?
Hummingbird
Hummingbirds rotate their wings at the shoulder to generate lift on both the forward and backward stroke, which lets them hover and fly backwards; their wings beat up to about 80 times a second.
Q 15Which Mexican salamander can regrow lost limbs, gills and even parts of its brain?
Axolotl
The axolotl can regrow limbs, gills, spinal cord, jaw and parts of its brain without scarring; its 32-billion-base-pair genome was, when first published, the largest animal genome ever sequenced.
Q 16The peacock mantis shrimp strikes with an acceleration of roughly how many g?
10,400 g
Sheila Patek's high-speed footage measured the peacock mantis shrimp's club at about 10,400 g, reaching roughly 83 km/h; the strike creates cavitation bubbles whose collapse delivers a second blow, and clubs have cracked aquarium glass.
Q 17In which animal does the male carry the developing eggs and give birth?
Seahorse
Seahorse females deposit eggs in a brood pouch on the front of the male's tail; he fertilises and carries them for two to four weeks, then gives birth to fully formed young.
Q 18Which animal has the longest known lifespan of any vertebrate, estimated at 272 years or more?
Greenland shark
The Greenland shark is the longest-lived vertebrate known: radiocarbon dating of eye-lens proteins put the oldest sampled female at about 392 years, give or take 120, so at least 272.
Q 19Which birds have been shown to recognise and remember individual human faces?
Crows
Crows recognise and remember individual human faces: in John Marzluff's Seattle experiments, crows trapped by people wearing a 'dangerous' mask scolded that mask for years afterwards and taught others to do the same.
Q 20What colour is a polar bear's skin under its fur?
Black
A polar bear's skin is black, which helps it absorb warmth; the fur only looks white because its transparent, hollow guard hairs scatter visible light.
Q 24How many deaths were officially recorded in the 1666 Great Fire of London?
Only a few
Only a few deaths, traditionally six, were recorded in the Great Fire of 1666, though some historians think the true toll was higher because poorer victims went unrecorded.
Q 25According to legend, which Roman emperor planned to make his horse Incitatus a consul?
Caligula
Suetonius says the horse had a marble stable, an ivory manger and purple blankets, though ancient sources agree the consulship never actually happened.
Q 26As a young man, Julius Caesar was kidnapped and held for ransom by whom?
Pirates
Cilician pirates seized Caesar near Pharmacusa around 75 BC; Plutarch says he joked he would return and crucify them, then did exactly that once the ransom was paid.
Q 27In 1698, Tsar Peter I of Russia introduced a tax on what?
Beards
Peter the Great's 1698 beard tax was part of his drive to make Russia look Western European; men who paid for the right to keep their beards received a copper token as proof.
Q 28The last woolly mammoths survived until about 4,000 years ago where?
Wrangel Island
The last woolly mammoths lived on Wrangel Island off Siberia until about 4,000 years ago, which is after the Great Pyramid of Giza was built, so mammoths and pharaohs overlapped in time.
Q 29In 1859, San Francisco resident Joshua Norton proclaimed himself what?
Emperor of the United States
Joshua Norton declared himself Emperor of the United States in September 1859; San Francisco played along for two decades, restaurants took his own banknotes and some 10,000 people attended his 1880 funeral.
Q 30How many human casualties did the 1859 US–British 'Pig War' over the San Juan Islands have?
None
The only casualty was the pig, shot by an American farmer after it rooted through his potatoes on land both nations claimed.