Workplace Safety
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50 free Workplace Safety trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Most of the rules that keep people safe at work were written after something went wrong. Behind the hard hat, the guardrail and the hazard label there is usually a story: a builder who insisted on a net, a doctor who noticed that one trade kept getting the same illness, a disaster that changed the law. This workplace safety trivia quiz covers those stories alongside the practical knowledge from any safety briefing. Expect questions on construction sites, factories, laboratories and offices, on signs, labels and gear, on the regulators who write the rules, and on a few moments when film and television took safety training less than seriously. It is written for safety meetings, toolbox talks and team quiz nights, and for anyone curious about how work became less dangerous. Every answer comes with a short explanation, so the facts stick after the round is over.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Nineteen workers caught by a safety net while building which 1930s landmark formed the 'Half Way to Hell Club'?
Golden Gate Bridge
The Golden Gate Bridge had movable netting slung beneath its crews on the orders of chief engineer Joseph Strauss. Eleven men still died, ten of them when a scaffold tore through the net.
Q 02A giant storage tank that burst in Boston in 1919 sent a deadly 35 mph wave of what through the streets?
Molasses
Molasses weighing about 13,000 tons killed 21 people and injured 150 when the tank gave way. Witnesses said the rivets shot out of it with a sound like a machine gun.
Q 03Guardrails, movable gangways and screens meant only one worker died building which nineteenth-century landmark?
Eiffel Tower
The Eiffel Tower went up with 300 men working on site, and Gustave Eiffel's own precautions kept the toll to a single death.
Q 04Which scientist's research papers are still so radioactive that they are kept in lead-lined boxes?
Marie Curie
Marie Curie's notebooks are expected to stay radioactive for well over a thousand years, and anyone who consults them has to put on special clothing first.
Q 05Which cartoon father works as the safety inspector in Sector 7-G of the Springfield Nuclear Power Plant?
Homer Simpson
Homer Simpson, named by creator Matt Groening after his own father, is unqualified for the post and often neglects his duties or dozes off on the job.
Q 06Bronchiolitis obliterans, a lung disease linked to butter-flavouring fumes, is nicknamed after which factory-made snack?
Popcorn
Popcorn gave the disease its nickname after eight former workers at a plant in Jasper, Missouri fell ill. The culprit was diacetyl, the chemical behind the artificial butter taste.
Q 07Railroad foreman Phineas Gage survived an 1848 blasting accident that drove what completely through his head?
A tamping iron
A tamping iron, the rod used to pack sand over blasting powder, sparked against the rock and set off the charge. Gage lived another 12 years despite losing much of his left frontal lobe.
Q 08All 33 men trapped underground for 69 days in 2010 were winched to safety from a collapsed mine in which country?
Chile
Chile brought its miners up one at a time in a specially built capsule, while an estimated 5.3 million people watched the rescue on a live video stream.
Q 09Which glowing element poisoned 1920s American watch-dial painters who were told to point their brushes on their lips?
Radium
Radium was mixed into a luminous paint sold under the brand name Undark, and the women in each factory had been told that it was harmless.
Q 10Workers in pressurised chambers beneath the Brooklyn Bridge suffered which illness, then named 'caisson disease'?
The bends
The bends, or decompression sickness, put 110 men in the project doctor's care in the first five months of 1872 alone, and three of them died.
Q 11Mesothelioma, a cancer of the lining of the lungs, is caused chiefly by exposure to which fire-resistant mineral?
Asbestos
Asbestos lies behind more than 80% of cases, and the cancer typically appears around 40 years after the exposure that caused it.
Q 12Workplace noise limits are set in which unit, named in honour of a telephone pioneer?
Decibel
The decibel is one tenth of a bel, a larger and seldom-used unit named after Alexander Graham Bell.
Q 13The '20-20-20 rule', a break routine recommended to desk-bound office workers, is meant to rest which part of the body?
The eyes
The eyes get their rest when a computer user focuses on something 20 feet away for 20 seconds, once every 20 minutes.
Q 21Which future member of Franklin Roosevelt's Cabinet witnessed New York's Triangle Shirtwaist factory fire in 1911?
Frances Perkins
Frances Perkins found the fire a turning point in her life. Serving from 1933 to 1945, the longest term in her post, she was the first woman in a presidential cabinet.
Q 22'Phossy jaw', a disease that destroyed the jawbone, struck nineteenth-century workers who made which household item?
Matches
Matches were made with white phosphorus, and its vapour ate away the bones of the jaw. One early patient was a Viennese matchstick maker who had breathed the fumes for five years.
Q 23In 1775 surgeon Percivall Pott tied a cancer to soot, the first ever linked to a job, among which workers?
Chimney sweeps
Q 14Ahead of electrocutions and crush injuries, what is the leading cause of worker deaths on construction sites?
Falls
Falls lead the toll and are a particular danger to older and untrained workers. OSHA's construction training lists them among its 'Focus Four' hazards.
Q 15The builders of which Colorado River dam, Six Companies, ordered their workers to wear hard hats in 1931?
Hoover Dam
Hoover Dam's crews got their helmets twelve years after Edward Bullard patented the 'Hard-Boiled hat', which he made from steamed canvas, glue and paint.
Q 16OSHA files its lockout/tagout rules, which keep machines switched off during repairs, under 'Control of Hazardous' what?
Energy
Energy is the word because the rules reach well beyond electricity: mechanical, hydraulic, pneumatic, chemical and thermal sources can all hurt someone servicing a machine.
Q 17Safety trainers teach the '4-to-1 rule' so that workers set which piece of equipment at a stable angle?
A ladder
A ladder leaning on a wall should stand with its foot about one quarter of its working length out from the support, a ratio written into OSHA's construction standards.
Q 18The 2013 Rana Plaza collapse, the deadliest garment-factory disaster in history, happened in which country?
Bangladesh
Bangladesh lost 1,134 people when the nine-storey building came down near Dhaka, a day after large cracks had been discovered in it.
Q 19Since it opened in 1971, the workplace regulator OSHA has belonged to which US Cabinet department?
Labor
The Department of Labor had handled some work-safety issues since 1934 through its Bureau of Labor Standards, long before OSHA existed.
Q 20Which chemist's 1815 miners' lamp enclosed its flame in a fine mesh screen so that it could not ignite firedamp?
Humphry Davy
Humphry Davy's lamp doubled as a gas detector, because its flame burned higher with a blue tinge when a flammable mixture was present.
Chimney sweeps knew the growths as 'soot warts'. Pott blamed the soot that lodged in their skin, and the disease still carries the name chimney sweeps' carcinoma.
Q 24Which American chemical company's pesticide plant leaked the toxic gas that devastated Bhopal, India, in 1984?
Union Carbide
Union Carbide paid $470 million in 1989 to settle claims over the methyl isocyanate leak, which exposed more than 500,000 people living around the plant.
Q 25Which fertiliser chemical blew up aboard the ship Grandcamp at Texas City in 1947 and in Beirut's port in 2020?
Ammonium nitrate
Ammonium nitrate in the Grandcamp's hold caused the deadliest industrial accident in US history, killing at least 581 people. The Beirut blast involved 2,750 tonnes of it.
Q 26Described as America's worst mining disaster, a 1907 explosion that killed 362 men at Monongah happened in which state?
West Virginia
West Virginia's loss at the Monongah mines was one of the events that led to the creation of the United States Bureau of Mines.
Q 27Which 1983 film stars Meryl Streep as a real plutonium-plant worker who blew the whistle on her employer?
Silkwood
Silkwood, directed by Mike Nichols from a script by Nora Ephron and Alice Arlen, co-stars Kurt Russell and Cher. The real Karen Silkwood died in a car crash.
Q 28In The Office episode 'Safety Training', what replaces the trampoline Michael Scott hid to break his leap from the roof?
A bouncy castle
A bouncy castle is brought in after a watermelon dropped as a test bounces off the trampoline and hits a co-worker's car. The staff talk Michael down before he can jump.
Q 29'Welder's flash', a painful burn to the cornea from an unshielded electric arc, is caused by which type of radiation?
Ultraviolet
Ultraviolet rays from the arc act on the cornea much as strong sun does on skin, which is why the same injury is also known as snow blindness.
Q 30Which sewer gas smells of rotten eggs at first but quickly deadens the sense of smell, hiding a lethal build-up?
Hydrogen sulfide
Hydrogen sulfide forms wherever organic matter rots without oxygen, so it also gathers in swamps, landfills and farm manure stores.