Yellow
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6correct to beat the crowd
40 free Yellow trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Yellow is the colour of sunshine, school buses and rubber ducks, and it is hard to miss. That is why it turns up on warning signs, taxi cabs, referees' cards and a certain famous cycling jersey. This quiz covers yellow wherever it appears: cartoon and video game characters, hit songs with yellow in the title, football kits and tennis balls, spices, fruit and wild plants, and the chemistry that makes things yellow in the first place. Many questions have a yellow thing as the answer; others ask for the story behind a yellow name, from Yellowstone to yellow journalism. It is pitched for general-knowledge players: most questions can be worked out with a little thought, a few are for specialists, and every answer comes with a short explanation.
30 of 40 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Tennis balls turned optic yellow in 1972 for television viewers, but which Grand Slam kept white ones until 1986?
Wimbledon
Wimbledon stuck with white balls for 14 years after optic yellow arrived. In one poll, a slight majority of people said the ball actually looks green, not yellow.
Q 02English referee Ken Aston based football's yellow and red cards on which everyday colour-coded system?
Traffic lights
Traffic lights gave Aston the idea after a confusing incident at the 1966 World Cup, where he was in charge of the referees. The cards first appeared at the 1970 tournament in Mexico.
Q 03Which small yellow songbird did coal miners once carry underground to warn them of carbon monoxide?
Canary
Canary cages went down the pits from 1896, a year after John Scott Haldane proposed using a warm-blooded animal as a living gas alarm.
Q 04Which office staple got its yellow colour by chance, from the scrap paper a neighbouring lab had to spare?
Post-it Note
Post-it Note glue was an accident too: in 1968, 3M scientist Spencer Silver was trying to make a super-strong adhesive and ended up with a weak, reusable one.
Q 05Which yellow fruit, botanically a berry, reaches Western supermarkets mostly as one variety called the Cavendish?
Banana
Banana plants are giant herbs rather than trees. Cavendish fruit is the main kind eaten in the West, but diseases such as black sigatoka threaten the crop.
Q 06Which member of the Beatles sang lead on Yellow Submarine, written as a children's song for the album Revolver?
Ringo Starr
Ringo Starr, the band's drummer, had the track as his vocal spot on the 1966 album. He has gone on singing it for decades at concerts with his All Starr Band.
Q 07Graphic artist Harvey Ball earned just $45 in 1963 for drawing which yellow icon in about ten minutes?
Smiley face
Smiley face pins made Ball no fortune: he never trademarked the design, and when he tried in 1971 he was told it was already in the public domain.
Q 08In American slang, a new car that keeps breaking down is nicknamed after which sour yellow fruit?
Lemon
Lemon laws in the United States exist to make carmakers buy back or exchange vehicles that stay faulty after repeated repair attempts.
Q 09In which cycling race does the overall leader wear a yellow jersey, officially first worn by Eugène Christophe in 1919?
Tour de France
Tour de France leaders may wear yellow because the organising newspaper, L'Auto, was printed on yellow paper. A rival story says it was the only colour a maker could supply at short notice.
Q 10Which British band scored its first UK top-five hit in 2000 with Yellow, from the debut album Parachutes?
Coldplay
Coldplay saw the single climb to number four on the UK chart. In the United States it was held back until November 2000 and released as the album's lead single.
Q 11Which author sent Dorothy down a road of yellow brick in the 1900 novel The Wonderful Wizard of Oz?
L. Frank Baum
L. Frank Baum laid the road from Munchkin Country to the Emerald City, which sits at the exact centre of Oz. W. W. Denslow illustrated the book.
Q 12Yellow fever, which can turn a patient's skin yellow through liver damage, is spread by the bite of which insect?
Mosquito
Mosquito bites carry the virus, and in cities the main culprit is the species Aedes aegypti. Only about 15 percent of patients enter the toxic phase that brings jaundice.
Q 13Which yellow Pokémon's name blends the Japanese sounds for an electric sparkle and a mouse's squeak?
Pikachu
Q 21Which metallic element gives low-pressure street lamps a yellow-orange glow so pure that colours cannot be told apart?
Sodium
Sodium atoms pour about 90 percent of the lamp's visible output into one narrow yellow band, the D-line. That makes the lamps highly efficient but hopeless for judging colour.
Q 22Saffron, the costly spice that gives rice dishes a golden-yellow hue, comes from the dried threads of which flower?
Crocus
Crocus sativus yields the spice from its crimson stigmas and styles, which are collected and dried. The colour that reaches the plate comes from a pigment called crocin.
Q 23Which yellow-flowered lawn weed takes its English name from a French phrase describing its jagged leaves?
Dandelion
Pikachu became the franchise mascot largely through the anime, where it travels as the companion of Ash Ketchum. In the games a Thunder Stone evolves it into Raichu.
Q 14Which Hogwarts house in the Harry Potter books wears yellow and black and has a badger as its mascot?
Hufflepuff
Hufflepuff prizes hard work, patience, justice and loyalty. J. K. Rowling has said the house corresponds roughly to the element of earth.
Q 15Which bright yellow element, known in older writing as brimstone, gives Jupiter's volcanic moon Io its colours?
Sulfur
Sulfur was long called brimstone, a word meaning 'burning stone'. In Genesis, fire and brimstone rain down on the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah.
Q 16Which painter rented rooms in the Yellow House in Arles, where Paul Gauguin joined him for nine weeks in 1888?
Vincent van Gogh
Vincent van Gogh took four rooms there in May 1888 and made the building the subject of an oil painting, which he first titled The House and its environment.
Q 17Which yellow spice, a member of the ginger family, gets its colour from a chemical called curcumin?
Turmeric
Turmeric yields curcumin, a bright yellow chemical approved as a food additive in the European Union and the United States. Botanists know the plant as Curcuma longa.
Q 18Uma Thurman's yellow tracksuit in Kill Bill echoes the outfit which martial arts star wore in Game of Death?
Bruce Lee
Bruce Lee's outfit is not the only borrowing: the Bride's helmet and motorcycle in Quentin Tarantino's film resemble his as well.
Q 19On the traditional painter's colour wheel of red, yellow and blue, which colour is the complement of yellow?
Purple
Purple is mixed from red and blue, so setting it beside yellow brings all three painter's primaries together. In the RGB model used for screens, yellow's opposite is blue instead.
Q 20In the CMYK model used by colour printers, the Y stands for yellow; which ink does the C stand for?
Cyan
Cyan joins magenta, yellow and black, whose K stands for the 'key' plate that prints crisp outlines and text. Adding black also cuts the amount of coloured ink needed.
Dandelion is a contraction of the Old French dent de lion, itself a translation of the Medieval Latin dens leonis. The teeth in question are the jagged edges of the leaves.
Q 24Yellow journalism got its name in an 1890s circulation war between Joseph Pulitzer's New York World and whose Journal?
William Randolph Hearst
William Randolph Hearst lured away the World's cartoonist Richard Outcault, whose popular Yellow Kid strip then ran in the Journal. The comic gave the sensational style its name.
Q 25Which national football team gave up its white kit after a home World Cup defeat in 1950 and switched to yellow shirts?
Brazil
Brazil lost 2–1 to Uruguay in the match remembered as the Maracanazo. A newspaper competition for a new kit was won by the teenager Aldyr Schlee, and the yellow shirts were first worn in 1954.
Q 26The Yellow Wall, a south terrace with room for 25,000 fans, belongs to the stadium of which German football club?
Borussia Dortmund
Borussia Dortmund fans fill what is the largest free-standing grandstand in Europe. Asked whether he feared the team's players or manager more, Bastian Schweinsteiger said the Yellow Wall.
Q 27Yellow was the emperor's colour in imperial China, so nearly every roof in which Beijing palace has yellow tiles?
Forbidden City
Forbidden City roofs carry yellow glazed tiles almost throughout. Bright yellow could be worn only by the emperor and his household, and special guests were welcomed on a yellow carpet.
Q 28Yellowcake is a powdered concentrate made as an intermediate step in processing the ores of which metal?
Uranium
Uranium ore is milled and chemically treated to make yellowcake, which is typically about 80 percent uranium oxide. The powder is produced after mining but before enrichment or fuel fabrication.
Q 29Which Canadian singer wrote Big Yellow Taxi on her first trip to Hawaii, releasing it on Ladies of the Canyon?
Joni Mitchell
Joni Mitchell recalled looking down from her hotel at a parking lot that ran as far as the eye could see. The 1970 song is known for its environmental concern.
Q 30Which American writer's 1892 story The Yellow Wallpaper is the journal of a woman confined by her physician husband?
Charlotte Perkins Gilman
Charlotte Perkins Gilman has the husband keep his wife in an upstairs nursery and forbid her to work or write, his cure for what he calls a temporary nervous depression.