Trivia Questions and Answers
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147 free Trivia Questions and Answers trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
This is our flagship set of trivia questions and answers: 100 multiple-choice miscellaneous trivia questions spread across history, geography, science, sport, film and TV, music, food and drink, animals, literature, pop culture and technology. They start with easy warm-ups everyone at the table can get, move through solid pub-quiz territory, and finish with a run of questions that will separate the trivia nerds from the casual players. Every question has one right answer, three plausible wrong ones and a short explanation that adds something you did not know. Nothing is filler: each fact was checked against an encyclopaedia or primary source before it went in, and every question shows its source. Use the set as a solo quiz, screen it for a family game night, lift ten trivia questions for your bar round, or keep it open as dinner trivia questions between courses. If you finish all 100, the daily challenge is new every day.
30 of 147 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which continent is, on average, the driest and windiest on Earth?
Antarctica
Antarctica, also the coldest continent, is battered by katabatic winds pouring off its high polar plateau, and its interior gets under 50 mm of precipitation a year.
Q 02What is the chemical formula of ordinary table salt?
NaCl
NaCl, sodium chloride, bonds sodium, a metal that reacts violently with water, to chlorine, a poison gas used as a weapon in World War I.
Q 03How many squares are there on a standard chessboard?
64
64 squares, eight by eight: in the wheat-and-chessboard legend, doubling one grain per square adds up to over 18 quintillion grains.
Q 04Which fashion doll did Ruth Handler introduce in 1959?
Barbie
Barbie was named after Ruth Handler's daughter Barbara and modelled on Bild Lilli, a German doll Handler bought on a trip to Europe.
Q 05Which spotted cat has black 'tear marks' running from its eyes to its mouth?
Cheetah
Cheetah tear marks may help cut the sun's glare, useful because, unlike most cats, cheetahs hunt mainly by day.
Q 06Which city settled Sydney and Melbourne's rivalry by becoming Australia's capital?
Canberra
Canberra had to be built from scratch, so federal Parliament sat in Melbourne until Canberra's provisional Parliament House opened in 1927.
Q 07Who directed the 1975 shark thriller Jaws?
Steven Spielberg
Steven Spielberg directed Jaws (1975); with the mechanical sharks constantly failing, he kept the shark mostly offscreen and leaned on John Williams's two-note theme.
Q 08Which Swedish group won the 1974 Eurovision Song Contest with "Waterloo"?
ABBA
ABBA won in Brighton, and 'Waterloo' went on to become their first UK number one, launching the band to worldwide fame.
Q 09What gas makes up about 78 percent of dry air by volume?
Nitrogen
Nitrogen makes up 78 percent of dry air, yet most organisms can't use it directly; it must first be fixed, mostly by bacteria.
Q 10Which mineral is a crystalline form of the element carbon?
Diamond
Graphite is actually the stable form of carbon at room conditions; diamond only survives because it converts to graphite at a negligible rate.
Q 11Which sport awards the Stanley Cup?
Ice hockey
Ice hockey's Stanley Cup is the rare trophy that each member of the winning team gets to keep for a day, a tradition since the mid-1990s.
Q 12What is the largest organ of the human body?
Skin
Skin is the body's largest organ, yet its outermost layer, the stratum corneum, is made of dead cells that are continually shed.
Q 13In which fictional town do the Simpsons live?
Springfield
Springfield was picked because it is one of America's most common town names, so, as Matt Groening put it, everyone would think it's their Springfield.
Q 21What is the name of the coffee shop where the six friends hang out in Friends?
Central Perk
Central Perk is the Manhattan coffee house where the six friends meet; the sitcom was developed under the working title Insomnia Cafe and ran on NBC from 1994 to 2004.
Q 22Which Beatles album, released in September 1969, was the last one the band recorded?
Abbey Road
Abbey Road was the last album the Beatles recorded, even though Let It Be came out later, in May 1970, after being taped mostly before it.
Q 23Who won the 2016 Nobel Prize in Literature for 'new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition'?
Bob Dylan
Bob Dylan received the 2016 Nobel Prize in Literature and skipped the December ceremony in Stockholm; he had already been given a Pulitzer Prize special citation in 2008.
Q 14Which comic book hero debuted in Action Comics #1 in 1938?
Superman
Superman couldn't fly in his debut, only leap tall buildings, and creators Siegel and Shuster got $130 for that first story while signing away the character.
Q 15Which mammals are the only ones capable of true, sustained flight?
Bats
Bats hang upside down without effort because their own body weight keeps their claws gripping the roost, so they can escape just by dropping.
Q 16Which nut-based confection is made mainly from sugar and ground almonds?
Marzipan
Marzipan is often moulded into pigs that Germans give as good-luck gifts, especially on New Year's Eve.
Q 17What is the smallest sovereign state in the world by both area and population?
Vatican City
Vatican City exists because of a standoff: after Italy seized Rome in 1870, popes refused to accept the loss until the 1929 Lateran Treaty created their sovereign state.
Q 18Which Tom Hanks film of 1994 was directed by Robert Zemeckis?
Forrest Gump
Forrest Gump was a huge hit, yet Paramount's accounting showed no net profit, so author Winston Groom received none of his 3 percent share.
Q 19How many keys does a standard modern piano have?
88
88 keys, 52 white and 36 black: Bösendorfer's Imperial has nine extra bass keys, first built so Busoni's transcriptions of Bach organ works could be played.
Q 20Which strait runs through Istanbul and separates Europe from Asia?
Bosporus
The Bosporus's Greek name was popularly read as 'ox ford', recalling the myth of Io, who crossed it after being turned into a cow.
Q 24What did Alexander Fleming discover in 1928 on a contaminated culture plate?
Penicillin
Penicillin sat largely forgotten because Fleming couldn't purify it; Howard Florey and Ernst Chain turned it into a drug around 1940, and all three shared the 1945 Nobel Prize.
Q 25Which mammal may be the longest-lived of all, with some individuals passing 200 years?
Bowhead whale
Bowhead whales have been caught still carrying harpoon tips from long-ago hunts, and newer ageing methods suggest some live over 200 years.
Q 26Which national team won the World Cup in 1958, 1962, 1970, 1994 and 2002?
Brazil
Brazil kept the original Jules Rimet Trophy for good after its third title in 1970, but it was stolen in Rio de Janeiro in 1983 and never recovered.
Q 27Which detective created by Agatha Christie is a retired Belgian police officer?
Hercule Poirot
Hercule Poirot's death in Curtain was written during the Second World War and locked in a bank vault, appearing only in 1975.
Q 28Inferno and Paradiso are two parts of Dante's Divine Comedy; what is the third?
Purgatorio
Purgatorio is the middle cantica: Dante climbs the seven terraces of Mount Purgatory, guided by the Roman poet Virgil until Beatrice takes over at the summit.
Q 29As of 2024, which country was the world's largest producer of cocoa beans?
Ivory Coast
Ivory Coast grows the most cocoa, yet the cacao tree is native to the Amazon, where it was first domesticated over 5,000 years ago.
Q 30Which US president told Mikhail Gorbachev to 'tear down this wall' in a Berlin speech?
Ronald Reagan
Ronald Reagan kept the line even though senior aides objected to it, and the Berlin Wall fell two years later, in 1989.