2016 Trivia
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100 free 2016 trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
2016 was the year of the upset: Leicester City at 5000-1, the Cubs after 108 years, the Cavaliers from 3–1 down, Brexit and an American election almost nobody called. It was also the year Pokémon Go emptied living rooms, Hamilton swept the Tonys and the last VCR rolled off the line. This quiz covers the news (the Panama Papers, the Rio Olympics, the Turkish coup attempt, the Paris agreement taking force), the sports, the science (Juno at Jupiter, four new elements, a proven Ebola vaccine) and the pop culture, from Lemonade and Views to Spotlight and Zootopia. Every answer is explained, so it works as a recap of a year that was strange even while it was happening.
30 of 100 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which drug lord was recaptured in January 2016 after escaping a Mexican maximum-security prison?
Joaquín 'El Chapo' Guzmán
Joaquín 'El Chapo' Guzmán had fled in July 2015 through a tunnel nearly a mile long that opened in his cell's shower; a secret interview he gave actor Sean Penn then helped the authorities track him down.
Q 02Tsai Ing-wen was elected the first female president of which country in January 2016?
Taiwan
Taiwan elected Tsai Ing-wen in a landslide; when she would not endorse Beijing's 'one China' formula, the 1992 Consensus, China suspended official contact with her government that June.
Q 03Which mosquito-borne virus did the WHO declare a global public health emergency in February 2016?
Zika
Zika had been linked to a surge of babies born with unusually small heads, and several top golfers, Rory McIlroy and Jason Day among them, skipped that summer's Olympics over it.
Q 04In 2016 Pope Francis became the first pope to meet the head of which church?
Russian Orthodox
The Russian Orthodox Church and Rome settled on neutral ground: Francis and Patriarch Kirill met in an airport lounge in Havana, where the Pope stopped on his way to Mexico, and signed a joint declaration.
Q 05Barack Obama's March 2016 trip to Cuba was the first by a sitting US president in 88 years, since whom?
Calvin Coolidge
Calvin Coolidge went to Havana in 1928 to address an international conference, the only trip abroad of his presidency; Obama's visit took in a baseball game watched beside Raúl Castro.
Q 06The March 2016 suicide bombings at Zaventem airport and a metro station struck which city?
Brussels
Brussels was hit four days after police there captured Salah Abdeslam, a suspect in the Paris attacks; Belgian investigators believed his arrest pushed the bombers to strike early.
Q 07The 11.5 million leaked documents published in April 2016 became known as what?
The Panama Papers
The Panama Papers came from the Panamanian law firm Mossack Fonseca; two days after they appeared, Iceland's prime minister said he would resign over an offshore company he had never declared.
Q 08Which Beyoncé album was released in April 2016, premiering as an hour-long HBO film?
Lemonade
Lemonade could be streamed only on Tidal, the service Beyoncé co-owned, for exactly three years; it reached Spotify and the other platforms in April 2019.
Q 09Which club won the 2015–16 Premier League after starting the season at 5000–1 odds?
Leicester City
Leicester City had spent months at the bottom of the table the season before; they were confirmed champions on May 2 without kicking a ball, when Tottenham drew 2–2 at Chelsea.
Q 10Who was elected President of the Philippines in May 2016?
Rodrigo Duterte
Rodrigo Duterte, long-time mayor of Davao, campaigned on a vow to wipe out crime within six months; the police drug war that followed killed more than 6,000 people by the government's own count.
Q 11Jamala won the 2016 Eurovision Song Contest for which country with '1944', a song about Stalin's wartime deportations?
Ukraine
Ukraine's Jamala drew on the story of her great-grandmother, a Crimean Tatar deported with her five children; Russian politicians urged the organisers to reject the song, but it competed and won.
Q 12Harambe, the gorilla shot in May 2016 after a boy entered his enclosure, lived at which zoo?
Cincinnati Zoo
Cincinnati Zoo staff shot Harambe to protect a three-year-old who had fallen into the gorilla moat; the zoo was then trolled so heavily that it deleted its Twitter account that August.
Q 13The world's longest and deepest railway tunnel opened in June 2016 in which country?
Switzerland
Q 21The 2016 Summer Olympics were the first held on which continent?
South America
South America's first Games, in Rio de Janeiro, were also the first Summer Olympics held entirely in the host country's winter, because August falls in the southern cold season.
Q 22Which Brazilian president was impeached and removed by the Senate in August 2016?
Dilma Rousseff
Dilma Rousseff was removed by 61 votes to 20 for manipulating the federal budget, which ended 13 years of Workers' Party rule; her vice president, Michel Temer, served out the term.
Q 23OSIRIS-REx, launched in September 2016, was NASA's first mission to return samples from what?
An asteroid
Switzerland put the project to its voters, who backed it in a 1992 referendum; the 57 km Gotthard Base Tunnel under the Alps was built to shift freight from trucks to trains.
Q 14Which team won UEFA Euro 2016, beating the hosts in the final?
Portugal
Portugal had drawn all three group games and scraped through in third place; in the final, with Cristiano Ronaldo off injured, substitute Eder beat hosts France from long range in extra time.
Q 15In the June 2016 Brexit referendum, which of the UK's four nations voted most strongly to remain in the EU?
Scotland
Scotland voted 62% to 38% to stay, and within hours First Minister Nicola Sturgeon said a second independence referendum was 'highly likely'.
Q 16NASA's Juno spacecraft entered orbit around which planet in July 2016?
Jupiter
Jupiter, in Roman myth, hid his mischief behind a veil of clouds that only his wife Juno could see through, so NASA gave her name to the probe sent to look beneath the planet's cloud tops.
Q 17Which augmented-reality mobile game did the developer Niantic release in July 2016?
Pokémon Go
Pokémon Go added $9 billion to Nintendo's market value in five days; the shares then plunged when Nintendo pointed out that it had neither made the game nor earned much from it.
Q 18A truck attack during Bastille Day celebrations in July 2016 killed 86 people in which French city?
Nice
Nice: the 19-tonne lorry ploughed into crowds watching the holiday fireworks on the seafront Promenade des Anglais, and stopped only when police shot the driver dead.
Q 19A faction of which country's armed forces staged a failed coup on July 15–16, 2016?
Turkey
Turkey's President Erdoğan, away on holiday when the tanks rolled, called a TV station by FaceTime and urged supporters onto the streets; by morning the rebel soldiers were surrendering.
Q 20Japan's Funai Electric made the world's last machines for which home-video format in July 2016?
VHS
VHS had long since beaten Sony's Betamax in the format war; Funai, the last company still building its recorders, gave up in 2016, blaming falling sales and a shortage of parts.
An asteroid: the probe touched Bennu for only a few seconds in 2020 and scooped up so much rubble that rocks wedged its collector's flap open, letting bits of the sample drift off into space.
Q 24Two Van Gogh paintings found in 2016 had been stolen in 2002 from a museum in which city?
Amsterdam
Amsterdam's Van Gogh Museum was raided by thieves with a ladder and sledgehammers; Italian police found both paintings in a house near Naples tied to a Camorra drug gang.
Q 25Hurricane Matthew killed more than 500 people in October 2016 in which Caribbean country?
Haiti
Haiti took the storm's first landfall, the strongest hurricane to strike it in over fifty years; local officials put the toll far above the government's count, and a cholera outbreak worsened in its wake.
Q 26Which team won the 2016 World Series, ending a 108-year championship drought?
Chicago Cubs
The Chicago Cubs trailed three games to one, then took Game 7 by 8–7 in ten innings, after a 17-minute rain delay in which outfielder Jason Heyward gathered the team for a pep talk.
Q 27Which country abruptly demonetised its high-value banknotes in November 2016?
India
India's prime minister Narendra Modi declared the 500- and 1,000-rupee notes, about 86% of the cash in circulation, void from midnight, hoping to flush out untaxed 'black money'; long bank queues followed.
Q 28LaMia Flight 2933 crashed in 2016 carrying which Brazilian club to the biggest match in its history?
Chapecoense
Chapecoense were flying to the first leg of the Copa Sudamericana final when the plane ran out of fuel near Medellín; their opponents, Atlético Nacional, asked that they be given the title, and they were.
Q 29Who became King of Thailand in December 2016 after his father's 70-year reign?
Vajiralongkorn
Vajiralongkorn asked for time to mourn before taking the throne, so the 96-year-old former prime minister Prem Tinsulanonda served as regent for the seven weeks in between.
Q 30Which four chemical elements were officially named in November 2016?
Nihonium, moscovium, tennessine, oganesson
Nihonium, moscovium, tennessine and oganesson follow the tradition of honouring a place or a scientist: Japan, the Moscow region, Tennessee and the physicist Yuri Oganessian.