80 free Trivia Facts trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Aug 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 80 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which food, properly stored, essentially never spoils, with samples from ancient tombs still edible?
Honey
Its high sugar concentration and acidity stop most microbes growing, which is why archaeologists have found jars of it still edible after millennia.
Q 02On which planet does a single day (one rotation) last longer than its year?
Venus
It takes 243 Earth days to spin once but only about 225 to circle the Sun, and it spins the wrong way too.
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
That is about five times hotter than the surface of the Sun, and the sudden expansion of that air 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
The metal on the sunny side expands more than the shaded side, so the whole tower bends slightly away from the heat.
Q 06Which microscopic animals have survived direct exposure to the vacuum of outer space?
Tardigrades
Also called water bears, they curl into a dried-out 'tun' state and shrug off vacuum, radiation and temperatures near absolute zero.
Q 07Which planet is the only one in the Solar System less dense than water?
Saturn
Its average density is about 0.69 grams per cubic centimetre, so in a big enough bathtub it would, in theory, float.
Q 08Which planet's position was worked out mathematically before anyone had knowingly seen it?
Neptune
Urbain Le Verrier and John Couch Adams each predicted where it must be from wobbles in Uranus's orbit, and Galle found it within a degree of Le Verrier's spot in 1846.
Q 09Pluto, discovered in 1930, will complete its first full orbit since its discovery in which year?
2178
One Plutonian year lasts almost 248 Earth years, so nobody alive has seen it go all the way round.
Q 10If all the gold ever mined were melted into a single cube, roughly how long would each side be?
About 22 metres
Around 200,000 tonnes in total, which is less than most people guess and would fit comfortably inside a stadium.
Q 11Up to how long can a sloth hold its breath underwater?
40 minutes
They slow an already sluggish heart rate to less than a third of normal, and are surprisingly good swimmers.
Q 12What gives flamingos their pink colour?
Their food
Chicks hatch grey and only turn pink from the carotenoids in the plankton and 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
Mothers also wrap their pups in it while they dive for food, so the youngster stays put and cries loudly if it wakes up alone.
Q 21Which birds cannot move their eyes at all and must turn their whole head instead?
Owls
Their eyes are fixed in bony tubes, which is why they evolved the ability to swivel the head as much as 270 degrees.
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 23Teaching at which university is documented as far back as 1096, making it older than the Aztec Empire?
Oxford
It is the oldest university in the English-speaking world and the second oldest anywhere in continuous operation.
Q 14Which bird's wing structure allows helicopter-like flight in any direction, including backwards and hovering?
Hummingbird
Its wings beat up to 99 times a second in the smallest species, and that beating is what makes the hum.
Q 15Which Mexican salamander can regrow lost limbs, gills and even parts of its brain?
Axolotl
Its genome, published in 2018, was the largest animal genome sequenced at the time, at 32 billion base pairs.
Q 16The peacock mantis shrimp strikes with an acceleration of roughly how many g?
10,400 g
The clubs go from a standing start to about 83 km/h so fast they boil the water in front of them, and have cracked aquarium glass.
Q 17In which animal does the male carry the developing eggs and give birth?
Seahorse
The female deposits her eggs in a brood pouch on the front of his tail, and he releases fully formed young weeks later.
Q 18Which animal has the longest known lifespan of any vertebrate, estimated at 272 years or more?
Greenland shark
Radiocarbon dating of the eye lens put the oldest individual at around 392 years, give or take a century.
Q 19Which birds have been shown to recognise and remember individual human faces?
Crows
They also make tools and warn each other about specific people they consider a threat, so it pays to be polite.
Q 20What colour is a polar bear's skin under its fur?
Black
The fur itself is not white either: the guard hairs are transparent and only look white because they scatter light.
Q 24The Great Fire of London in 1666 destroyed most of the city, yet how many deaths were recorded?
Only a few
Some historians think the true toll was higher because the poor and middle class were not recorded, but the traditional count is in single figures.
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
Plutarch says he joked with his captors that he would come back and crucify them, then did exactly that after the ransom was paid.
Q 27In 1698, Tsar Peter I of Russia introduced a tax on what?
Beards
Men who paid received a copper token to prove it, part of Peter's push to make Russia look more Western European.
Q 28The last woolly mammoths survived until about 4,000 years ago where?
Wrangel Island
That is after the Great Pyramid of Giza was built, so mammoths and Egyptian pharaohs overlapped in time.
Q 29In 1859, San Francisco resident Joshua Norton proclaimed himself what?
Emperor of the United States
The city largely played along for two decades: restaurants accepted his own currency and thousands turned out for his 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.