Workplace
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7correct to beat the crowd
50 free Workplace trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Most of us spend a large share of our lives on the job, yet the stories behind working life are easy to miss: who dreamed up the cubicle, why offices dress down on Fridays, and how a secretary's kitchen experiment ended up on desks everywhere. This quiz mixes the fun with the serious. There are sitcom offices, movie bosses and songs about the daily grind, alongside the strikes, laws and holidays that shaped how Americans work. A good share of the questions are about women in the workplace, from wartime factory hands to the first female chief executives, cabinet members and Wall Street brokers. It is written for team meetings, office parties, staff newsletters and anyone who enjoys a good story about work. Every answer comes with a short explanation, so you can play it straight through or print it for a group.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01The word 'salary' traces back to the Latin name of which seasoning, also the root of 'salad' and 'sausage'?
Salt
Salt gave Latin 'salarium', the pay of Roman soldiers, though the popular claim that legions were paid in the stuff itself is baseless.
Q 02Which country star clacked her acrylic fingernails to make the typewriter beat of the office anthem '9 to 5'?
Dolly Parton
Dolly Parton earned an Oscar nomination for '9 to 5', the title song of the 1980 comedy that gave her a first film role beside Jane Fonda and Lily Tomlin.
Q 03Which company sells the Post-it Note, born when an employee wanted a bookmark that would stay put in his hymn book?
3M
3M chemist Spencer Silver had made the weak glue by accident, and colleague Arthur Fry found its use in 1974. The yellow came by chance: it was the only scrap the lab next door had.
Q 04Which symbol of American women in wartime factories began as a 1942 song by Redd Evans and John Jacob Loeb?
Rosie the Riveter
Rosie the Riveter was a hit song first. The famous 'We Can Do It!' poster, made for Westinghouse, was never called by that name during the war.
Q 05Casual Friday grew out of a 1960s campaign by garment makers to get printed shirts into offices in which U.S. state?
Hawaii
Hawaii's shirt makers gave two aloha shirts to every state legislator, then won 'Aloha Friday' in 1966. The habit spread east through California and around the globe.
Q 06What is Homer Simpson's main job in Sector 7-G of the Springfield Nuclear Power Plant?
Safety inspector
Safety inspector is Homer's steady role, though he held more than 188 other jobs in the first 400 episodes of The Simpsons.
Q 07Which small caged birds did coal miners carry underground as living alarms for carbon monoxide and other toxic gases?
Canaries
Canaries kept that job in British pits until 1986, when electronic gas detectors finally replaced them.
Q 08Which office word named a boundary in Civil War stockades like Andersonville that captives were shot for crossing?
Deadline
Deadline meant a do-not-cross line inside the stockade wall, cited at the trial of Andersonville's commander. Newspapers gave the word its time-limit sense by 1919.
Q 09Bette Nesmith Graham, a secretary whose son joined The Monkees, mixed which office product in her kitchen blender?
Liquid Paper
Liquid Paper began as tempera paint she called 'Mistake Out' and poured into old nail polish bottles. She sold the company to Gillette in 1979 for at least $47.5 million.
Q 10Which carmaker stunned rivals in 1914 by more than doubling factory pay to five dollars a day?
Ford
Ford's five-dollar day ended the constant staff turnover on its assembly lines. In 1926 its factories also moved to a five-day, 40-hour week.
Q 11Which Secretary of Labor, appointed by Franklin D. Roosevelt, was the first woman to serve in a U.S. Cabinet?
Frances Perkins
Frances Perkins handed Roosevelt a long list of programs she would fight for, from Social Security to a minimum wage, then served until 1945.
Q 12Katharine Graham, the first woman to run a Fortune 500 company, published which newspaper during Watergate?
The Washington Post
The Washington Post had been handed by her father to her husband rather than to her. Her memoir of running it, Personal History, won a Pulitzer Prize in 1998.
Q 13Mary Barra, who joined as an 18-year-old co-op student, became the first female chief executive of which carmaker?
General Motors
Q 21Which former head of the Screen Actors Guild fired more than 11,000 striking air traffic controllers as U.S. president?
Ronald Reagan
Ronald Reagan gave the strikers 48 hours to return in 1981, then dismissed 11,345 of them and banned them from federal service for life.
Q 22The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, scene of a deadly 1911 fire in New York, made which item of clothing?
Women's blouses
Women's blouses, then called shirtwaists, were cut and sewn there. Stairwell doors were kept locked to stop theft and unauthorized breaks, and 146 garment workers died.
Q 23The photo 'Lunch atop a Skyscraper' shows eleven ironworkers on a beam during the building of which New York landmark?
Rockefeller Center
General Motors made Barra the first woman to lead a major automaker in 2014. Her first year in charge brought 84 recalls covering more than 30 million cars.
Q 14Madam C. J. Walker, listed by Guinness as America's first self-made female millionaire, made her fortune selling what?
Hair care products
Hair care products were her answer to her own scalp ailments and baldness. Born Sarah Breedlove, she had earlier worked as a laundress for barely more than a dollar a day.
Q 15Whose equal-pay lawsuit against Goodyear inspired the first bill that Barack Obama signed into law as president?
Lilly Ledbetter
Lilly Ledbetter had spent 19 years as a supervisor at the tire maker when an anonymous note told her she earned thousands less each year than the men in her job.
Q 16Which workplace metaphor, coined by Marilyn Loden in a 1978 speech, was later studied by a U.S. federal commission?
Glass ceiling
Glass ceiling caught on so widely that Congress set up a Glass Ceiling Commission in 1991 to study what keeps women and minorities out of senior corporate jobs.
Q 17Which economist was the first woman to chair the Federal Reserve and later the first to serve as Treasury Secretary?
Janet Yellen
Janet Yellen is also the first person to have led all three of the government's top economic bodies: the Treasury, the Federal Reserve and the White House Council of Economic Advisers.
Q 18Which Navy rear admiral and COBOL pioneer worked on the Harvard computer famously halted by a moth in a relay?
Grace Hopper
Grace Hopper's colleagues found the insect in 1947 and taped it into their logbook, which is now kept at the Smithsonian.
Q 19Which 2013 book by Facebook executive Sheryl Sandberg urged women to assert themselves at work and at home?
Lean In
Lean In sold 4.2 million copies in its first five years and lent its name to LeanIn.Org, the foundation Sandberg set up.
Q 20Which Texas cosmetics founder bought a pink Cadillac in 1968 and made the car a reward for her top sellers?
Mary Kay Ash
Mary Kay Ash started her company in 1963 after being passed over for a promotion in favor of a man she had trained.
Rockefeller Center staged the 1932 picture as a publicity stunt for its new RCA Building, with the men posed 850 feet up on the 69th floor.
Q 24Which 1906 Upton Sinclair novel about Chicago meatpacking workers shocked Congress into passing pure food laws?
The Jungle
The Jungle was written to win readers to socialism, but its slaughterhouse scenes turned their stomachs instead. 'I aimed at the public's heart,' Sinclair said, 'and by accident I hit it in the stomach.'
Q 25Which 1938 New Deal statute created the U.S. minimum wage and 'time-and-a-half' overtime pay?
Fair Labor Standards Act
Fair Labor Standards Act raises reached 700,000 workers at a stroke, and Franklin Roosevelt called it the most important New Deal law since Social Security.
Q 26The 401(k) retirement plan, pioneered by consultant Ted Benna, is named after a section of which federal law?
Internal Revenue Code
Internal Revenue Code section 401(k) struck Benna as a way to cut the tax on a bonus plan for bank executives, so he built one of the first such plans at his own firm.
Q 27Which president signed Labor Day into federal law in June 1894, during the Pullman railroad strike?
Grover Cleveland
Grover Cleveland was among those who feared a May 1 holiday would strengthen socialist and anarchist movements, so the first Monday of September won out.
Q 28Which folk hero of American song won a race against a steam-powered drill, only to die with a hammer in his hand?
John Henry
John Henry was a 'steel-driving man', pounding drills into rock so that explosives could blast out railroad tunnels.
Q 29Martin Luther King Jr. gave his final speech in Memphis in 1968 while supporting a strike by which city employees?
Sanitation workers
Sanitation workers walked out after two colleagues were crushed in a garbage compactor while sheltering from the rain. Their placards read 'I Am a Man'.
Q 30Which fictional company employs Michael Scott as manager of its Scranton branch in the American sitcom The Office?
Dunder Mifflin
Dunder Mifflin is the American stand-in for Wernham Hogg, the firm in the British original. Its logo ended up on display around the real downtown Scranton.