World Population Trivia
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96 free World Population trivia questions with answers — geography quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Eight billion people sounds abstract until you start asking where they all are: which continent is youngest, which country's births have dropped below one per woman, which territory squeezes 720,000 people into 33 square kilometres, and which has 35 residents. Population is the rare trivia subject where the obvious guess is usually wrong. These 96 questions run from the first billion to the UN's projected peak: the milestone babies, the megacities and the most and least crowded places on Earth, fertility and ageing records, the thinkers who panicked about overpopulation, and the history of counting people, from ancient tax registers and medieval surveys to the modern decennial census. Every answer is ranked or dated so it stays true, and every explanation adds a fact the question left out. Play it solo, use it as a geography round for a class or a pub quiz, or print it and hand it round.
30 of 96 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which island, home to more than 150 million people, is the most populous on Earth?
Java
Java packs more than half of its country's population onto about 7% of its land area, and it holds the capital that the government is now trying to relieve.
Q 02Which country recorded its first population fall since 1961 in 2022, the year the world passed eight billion?
China
China's population peaked in 2022 and has started to fall, and UN projections suggest it could drop below one billion before the end of the century.
Q 03Which country had the oldest population of any large nation in 2022, with over 29% of its people aged 65 or more?
Japan
Japan combines one of the world's longest life expectancies with decades of low birth rates, and its elderly have outnumbered its children since 1997.
Q 04Which country's fertility rate fell to 0.72 births per woman in 2023, the lowest in the world?
South Korea
South Korea's deaths have outnumbered its births every year since 2020, and in Seoul the rate has sunk even lower, to about 0.55.
Q 05Which continent has the youngest population in the world, with a median age of under 20 years?
Africa
Africa's youth is driving its growth: UN projections see it reaching about 3.8 billion people by 2100, more than a third of humanity.
Q 06Nearly nine in ten people live to the north of which line of latitude?
Equator
The Equator splits humanity very unevenly because the Northern Hemisphere holds about two-thirds of the planet's land, leaving under a billion people south of the line.
Q 07Which pandemic made the world's population shrink during the 14th century, killing a third or more of Europeans?
Black Death
The Black Death killed so many labourers that landowners had to offer wages and money rents to keep their tenants, loosening the old system of labour services.
Q 08Emilio Palma, the first person born in Antarctica, arrived in 1978 at a base run by which country?
Argentina
Argentina flew his mother to its Esperanza Base late in her pregnancy, and at least ten more children have since been born on the continent.
Q 09Which country passed 40 million people only in 2023, with immigration the main driver of its growth?
Canada
Canada added its 41st million within about a year of its 40th, a surge swollen by temporary residents such as students and workers, who made up about 6% of the population by 2023.
Q 10Which is the most populous country in Europe, although its numbers have been falling?
Russia
Russia has more people than any other European country, yet it is shrinking because deaths have outnumbered births there in most years since the Soviet Union broke up.
Q 11Danica May Camacho, one of the symbolic 'seven-billionth' babies chosen in 2011, was born in which country?
Philippines
The Philippines' Danica May Camacho was one of several symbolic babies named around the world, since nobody could know which birth really took the count to seven billion.
Q 12Adnan Mević, the UN's symbolic six-billionth person, was born in 1999 in which city, besieged earlier that decade?
Sarajevo
Sarajevo's Adnan Mević was welcomed at Koševo Hospital by UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan, who was in the city to monitor the peace agreement that had ended the war.
Q 13Which is the only country in the world with fewer than 1,000 residents?
Vatican City
Q 21Which inland municipality, roughly the size of Austria, is counted as the world's largest city proper by population?
Chongqing
Chongqing's 32 million residents are spread over a municipality the size of a country, and roughly a third of them live in the countryside rather than in any city.
Q 22Which city on the Buriganga River is widely considered the most densely populated built-up urban area in the world?
Dhaka
Dhaka keeps swelling as migrants pour in from the countryside, among them climate refugees who lost homes and farmland to floods and river erosion.
Q 23Which Brazilian state capital is the most populous city in both the Western and Southern Hemispheres?
São Paulo
Vatican City grants citizenship with the job rather than by birth, so hundreds of its citizens live outside it, among them papal diplomats posted abroad and cardinals based in Rome.
Q 14Which sovereign country is the most densely populated in the world?
Monaco
Monaco packs about 38,000 people into two square kilometres, and most of them are foreigners: fewer than a quarter of its residents are Monégasque.
Q 15Spread over all Earth's land, the 8.2 billion people alive in 2025 average roughly how many per square kilometre?
50 per km²
50 per km² is the right order of magnitude, though the average hides a very uneven spread: about 60% of all people live in Asia alone.
Q 16Which South Asian country of over 170 million people is the most densely populated large country in the world?
Bangladesh
Bangladesh is crowded because almost all of it is river delta: it covers most of the plain where the Ganges and Brahmaputra reach the sea.
Q 17Which special administrative region packs roughly 700,000 people into 33 square kilometres, the densest territory on Earth?
Macau
Macau, a Portuguese colony until its 1999 handover, has built two-thirds of its total area on land reclaimed from the sea.
Q 18Which self-governing Danish territory, home to about 56,000 people, is the least densely populated country in the world?
Greenland
Greenland is about four-fifths ice sheet, so its people live along the ice-free coast, mostly in the south-west.
Q 19Which British overseas territory had only 35 permanent residents in 2023, the fewest of any territory in the world?
Pitcairn Islands
Pitcairn Islands' people descend from the Bounty mutineers and their Tahitian companions, who reached the empty island in 1790, went ashore and burned the ship.
Q 20Which Pacific nation of about 10,000 people signed a 2023 treaty giving its citizens a migration route abroad as seas rise?
Tuvalu
Tuvalu's treaty offers only 280 places a year, and when the first ballot opened in 2025 the registrations covered more than half the country's population.
São Paulo began as a Jesuit mission founded on the feast of Saint Paul's conversion in 1554, and stayed in Rio's shadow until coffee made it rich in the late 19th century.
Q 24Which capital, first documented in 1147, is the most populous city lying entirely within Europe?
Moscow
Moscow takes the title because Istanbul, which is bigger, straddles the Bosphorus and lies partly in Asia.
Q 25Which capital anchors the largest urban agglomeration in the Arab world, with about 20 million people?
Cairo
Cairo is so congested that the government is building a new administrative capital in the desert 45 kilometres to the east to take the pressure off.
Q 26Which new capital in East Kalimantan is being built to relieve Jakarta of overpopulation and land sinking?
Nusantara
Nusantara hosted its first independence-day ceremony in August 2024, but the guest list was cut from 8,000 to 1,300 and its planned inauguration as capital that day was put off.
Q 27Which Hong Kong enclave, demolished in the 1990s, crammed about 33,000 people into 2.6 hectares?
Kowloon Walled City
Kowloon Walled City was an old fort that fell outside the colony's effective control and went largely ungoverned, so it grew unchecked until it was razed for a park.
Q 28Which English cleric's 1798 Essay on the Principle of Population argued that better food supply only breeds more people?
Thomas Malthus
Thomas Malthus's bleak picture of people outrunning their food was read by both Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace, and it helped shape the theory of natural selection.
Q 29Which Stanford professor co-wrote the 1968 book The Population Bomb, predicting worldwide famines from overpopulation?
Paul Ehrlich
Paul Ehrlich later bet the economist Julian Simon that five metals would grow scarcer and dearer by 1990, and lost when all five fell in price.
Q 30Which generation, its name popularised by the writer Douglas Coupland, followed the baby boomers from 1965?
Generation X
Generation X was at first known as the 'baby busters', because its members were born as birth rates slumped after the post-war boom.