Waterfalls Trivia
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60 free Waterfalls trivia questions with answers — geography quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
Every continent has a waterfall it thinks is the best, and this quiz visits most of them. It starts with the record-holders: Angel Falls and the pilot who crash-landed on top of it, the six-mile-wide Khone Phapheng, the Congo's Inga rapids, an underwater cataract in the Denmark Strait that dwarfs them all, and the dry one in Washington that was once the biggest ever. Then Niagara in detail: three falls, one Great Lake, a schoolteacher in a barrel, Blondin and Nik Wallenda on the wire, the day engineers switched the American Falls off and the day ice switched them all off. From there it crosses to Victoria Falls and its Devil's Pool, Iguazu's Devil's Throat and Eleanor Roosevelt's verdict on Niagara, Tugela's rival claim to be tallest, Kaieteur, Yosemite's hanging valleys, and a run of Icelandic falls with treasure legends and film cameos. Europe's Rhine, Marmore and Krimml, Croatia's Plitvice, China's Huangguoshu, India's Jog and Nohkalikai, and America's Multnomah, Havasu and Shoshone follow, along with the great falls of Guaíra and Celilo that dams put under water. Easy questions suit anyone who has stood in the spray of one; the expert tier reaches Lake Quill, Sigríður Tómasdóttir and Charles Barrington Brown. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's articles on the individual waterfalls, and the supporting sentence is attached to each question.
30 of 60 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Angel Falls, the world's tallest uninterrupted waterfall, is in which country?
Venezuela
Venezuela. The water leaps from Auyán-tepui, a flat-topped mountain, and barely touches its sheer face on the way down; the jungle around it is so dense that most visitors arrive by air.
Q 02How many Eiffel Towers, stacked up, would match the drop of Angel Falls?
About three
About three. The falls drop 979 metres and the tower stands some 330, so it takes three to reach the lip; the height was pinned down in 1949 by an expedition led by journalist Ruth Robertson.
Q 03Angel Falls is named after Jimmie Angel, who was what?
An American aviator
An American aviator. He spotted the falls from his plane in 1933 while hunting for gold, and in 1937 he landed on the summit, where the wheels sank into boggy ground and his party of four had to walk down through the jungle.
Q 04Angel Falls was the main inspiration for Paradise Falls in which 2009 Pixar film?
Up
Up. Director Pete Docter took Pixar artists to the table mountains to sketch them, then toned the scenery down: he said the real rocks and plants were so strange that audiences wouldn't have believed them.
Q 05Khone Phapheng in Laos, often listed as the world's widest waterfall, blocks boats on which river?
The Mekong
The Mekong. French colonial crews tried again and again to get steamers past the falls and failed, so they built a short narrow-gauge railway across two islands to carry cargo around them instead.
Q 06Inga Falls, often ranked the world's biggest waterfall by flow rate, is on which African river?
The Congo
The Congo. At Inga the river drops 96 metres, but over a run of roughly 15 kilometres, which is why many lists call it rapids and leave it out of the waterfall rankings altogether.
Q 07Earth's largest waterfall by volume is underwater, in the strait between Iceland and which island?
Greenland
Greenland. In the Denmark Strait, cold, dense Nordic water sinks beneath warmer water and pours more than two kilometres down the sea floor, and none of it shows at the surface.
Q 08Which Pacific Northwest falls, 3.5 miles wide and 400 feet high, were carved by Ice Age floods?
Dry Falls
Dry Falls. Each time the ice dam holding back glacial Lake Missoula gave way, a flood tore across the land and over this cliff; when the Ice Age ended the water stopped, leaving bare rock.
Q 09Niagara Falls lies on the border between Canada and which US state?
New York
New York. By the 1870s private owners on the American bank were charging visitors for a glimpse of the falls, until a campaign led by landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted got the state to buy the land in 1885.
Q 10Which of Niagara's waterfalls is the largest, carrying about nine-tenths of the river's water?
Horseshoe
Horseshoe. It drops about 57 metres and has the force to keep cutting its way upstream, while the thin flow over the American Falls can't even clear the fallen rock piled at its base.
Q 11The Niagara River carries Lake Erie's water over the falls and into which other Great Lake?
Ontario
Ontario. The Niagara River runs north, not south, tumbling over a long limestone escarpment between the two lakes, and from there the water heads out through the St. Lawrence to the Atlantic.
Q 12Who became the first person to go over Niagara Falls in a barrel, on 24 October 1901?
Annie Edson Taylor
Annie Edson Taylor. The widowed schoolteacher made the ride on her 63rd birthday hoping it would make her fortune, but the fame faded within months and she never earned much from it.
Q 13Which French tightrope walker first crossed the Niagara Gorge on a wire in June 1859?
Blondin
Q 21What is the 'Devil's Pool' on the Zambian side of Victoria Falls?
A natural rock basin at the lip
A natural rock basin at the lip. When the river runs low late in the year, a rock ledge right on the brink holds back the current, and swimmers can lie at the very edge and look straight down the drop.
Q 22Iguazu Falls sits on the border between which two countries?
Argentina and Brazil
Argentina and Brazil. Paraguay only just misses out: about 20 kilometres downstream the Iguazu runs into the Paraná, and the spot where the two rivers meet is where all three countries touch.
Q 23What is the name of the narrow chasm that swallows much of the Iguazu River?
Blondin. He kept coming back with new stunts, crossing blindfolded, on stilts, pushing a wheelbarrow and with his manager on his back, and once he sat down halfway to cook and eat an omelette.
Q 14In 2012 which high-wire artist made Niagara's first permitted tightrope crossing in 116 years?
Nik Wallenda
Nik Wallenda. Earlier walkers had all crossed the gorge downstream, but his wire ran right over the brink, and the network showing it live refused to go ahead unless he wore a safety harness, which he normally never did.
Q 15What did engineers do to the American Falls at Niagara in June 1969?
Diverted the river to dry them up
Diverted the river to dry them up. A temporary dam kept the rock face bare until November while engineers studied whether to clear the boulders heaped at its foot, and in the end they left them where they lay.
Q 16The only recorded complete stoppage of Niagara Falls happened in March 1848; what caused it?
An ice jam on Lake Erie
An ice jam on Lake Erie. Wind packed the lake's ice into the mouth of the river and plugged it, and for more than a day the falls went quiet, the waterwheels stopped and the mills along the banks shut down.
Q 17Niagara Falls once retreated over a metre a year; what slowed it to a fraction of that?
Hydropower drawing off the river
Hydropower drawing off the river. A large part of the flow vanishes into tunnels well above the brink and comes out at power stations downstream, and the thinner sheet left behind wears the rock back far more slowly.
Q 18Victoria Falls lies on which southern African river?
The Zambezi
The Zambezi. In flood the river throws up a column of spray hundreds of metres high that shows from far across the plain, which is why the local name, Mosi-oa-Tunya, means "the smoke that thunders".
Q 19Which Scottish missionary named Victoria Falls after the queen in 1855?
David Livingstone
David Livingstone. Local boatmen paddled him to an island on the very brink of the falls, where he crept to the edge to peer down into the chasm; the island now carries his name.
Q 20Victoria Falls is often ranked first among the world's waterfalls on what basis?
The biggest single sheet of falling water
The biggest single sheet of falling water. Plenty of falls are taller, but here the whole river drops 108 metres along a front about 1,700 metres wide, roughly double Niagara on both counts.
The Devil's Throat
The Devil's Throat. It is the highest part of the falls, a drop of about 80 metres, and the water lands so hard that a cloud of mist boils back up far above the rim and keeps the forest around it soaked.
Q 24Which US First Lady reportedly exclaimed 'Poor Niagara!' on seeing Iguazu Falls?
Eleanor Roosevelt
Eleanor Roosevelt. Guidebooks love the line, and the comparison holds up: the tallest drops at Iguazu reach 82 metres and its rim runs for 2.7 kilometres, nearly three times as wide as Niagara's.
Q 25The name Iguazu comes from Guarani words meaning what?
Big water
Big water. The Spanish explorer Cabeza de Vaca reached the falls in the early 1540s and christened them the Falls of Santa María, but the name faded and the Guarani one outlasted it.
Q 26Tugela Falls, which spills off the Drakensberg escarpment and may be the world's tallest waterfall, is in which country?
South Africa
South Africa. The long-quoted height is 948 metres, but a Czech survey team in 2016 measured 983, four more than Angel Falls' 979, and set about getting the record lists to swap the two.
Q 27Yosemite Falls is one of North America's tallest waterfalls; what usually happens to it by late summer?
It dries up
It dries up. The falls run on melting snow, so they thunder in May and June and have usually shrunk to a trickle or to bare rock by August, until the autumn storms start them again.
Q 28Kaieteur Falls, a sheer 226-metre drop deep in the rainforest, is in which South American country?
Guyana
Guyana. The Potaro River goes over the edge of a sandstone plateau in a single leap roughly four times the height of Niagara, and the spot is so remote that most visitors arrive from the capital by chartered plane.
Q 29The name of Gullfoss, one of Iceland's most famous waterfalls, means what?
Golden Falls
Golden Falls. When investors leased it for a power plant, farmer's daughter Sigríður Tómasdóttir walked to Reykjavík time and again to fight them and is said to have threatened to jump in; the scheme fell through and no plant was built.
Q 30Iceland's Dettifoss waterfall appears in the opening scene of which Ridley Scott film?
Prometheus
Prometheus. Scott said he had gone to Iceland to shoot "the beginning of time", and the falls, 100 metres wide and grey with glacial silt, play an unnamed planet where an alien gives up its body to seed life.