Getting your questions ready
Getting your questions ready
Beat the crowd
10 questions No timer
50 free 21st Century trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
44 free 21st century trivia questions with answers. The 21st century is only a quarter over, but it has already packed in more history than most: 9/11 and two wars, the iPhone and social media, a financial crash, a pandemic, popes from the Americas, private rockets landing on their tails and machines that talk back. This quiz covers the big moments of 2001 to 2025 in politics, science, technology, sport and culture. Expect questions on the tsunami and Katrina, Pluto's demotion, Phelps and Bolt, bitcoin's genesis block, the Arab Spring, Fukushima, the Higgs boson, Malala, Brexit, Leicester City and the Cubs, the first black hole photograph, Notre-Dame, COVID-19, the Ever Given, Webb, Queen Elizabeth II and ChatGPT. It works for a pub quiz round, a classroom current-affairs review or a family night arguing about what year things happened. Every answer has been checked against a primary source, mostly the relevant Wikipedia article, and the citation is attached to each question.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01In which year did the 21st century officially begin?
2001
The 21st century began on 1 January 2001: with no year zero, each century runs from year 1 to year 100, so the 1999 'millennium' parties were a year early.
Q 02Roughly how many people were killed in the September 11, 2001 attacks?
Nearly 3,000
Nearly 3,000 people died: 2,977 victims plus the 19 al-Qaeda hijackers who seized four airliners and struck the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and a field near Shanksville, Pennsylvania.
Q 03Dennis Tito made headlines in 2001 by becoming the world's first what?
Space tourist
Dennis Tito became the first space tourist that April, paying a reported $20 million to ride a Russian Soyuz to the International Space Station for about a week.
Q 04Which website, launched on January 15, 2001 by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger, became the go-to reference?
Wikipedia
Wikipedia went live that January and has been run since 2003 by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation, funded mainly by reader donations.
Q 05Euro banknotes and coins first entered circulation in which year?
2002
Euro cash arrived on 1 January 2002 in twelve countries; the currency had existed only as an accounting unit since 1999. Seven banknote denominations were issued, from €5 to €500.
Q 06Which supersonic airliner made its last commercial flight on 24 October 2003?
Concorde
Concorde cruised at Mach 2.02, over twice the speed of ordinary jets. Only Air France and British Airways flew it, seven each; the July 2000 crash outside Paris hastened its 2003 retirement.
Q 07In which year did the Human Genome Project, declared complete in 2003, begin?
1990
The Human Genome Project launched in October 1990 with a 15-year plan and finished two years early, with about 92% of the genome sequenced; the remaining gaps were closed in the 2020s.
Q 08The 26 December 2004 earthquake and tsunami was centred off the coast of which country?
Indonesia
Indonesia: the magnitude 9.1–9.3 quake struck off Aceh in northern Sumatra, and the tsunami it raised killed an estimated 227,898 people across 14 countries.
Q 09Which social network launched from a Harvard dorm room on February 4, 2004?
Facebook launched on 4 February 2004 as 'TheFacebook', built by Mark Zuckerberg and classmates at Harvard; it opened to the general public in September 2006.
Q 10Hurricane Katrina's storm surge broke the levees of which US city on August 29, 2005?
New Orleans
New Orleans: about 80% of the city flooded after its levees failed. Katrina caused roughly $125 billion in damage, and its death toll was revised to 1,392 in 2023.
Q 11Which body was demoted to dwarf-planet status when the IAU redefined 'planet' in 2006?
Pluto
Pluto failed the IAU's new test of having cleared its orbital neighbourhood, so it became a dwarf planet in August 2006; New Horizons flew past it on 14 July 2015.
Q 12Steve Jobs unveiled the original iPhone at Macworld on January 9 of which year?
2007
Jobs unveiled the iPhone on 9 January 2007, pitching it as a widescreen iPod, a revolutionary phone and a breakthrough internet communicator in one; it went on sale that June.
Q 13At the 2008 Summer Olympics, Michael Phelps won how many gold medals, a record for a single Games?
Eight
Phelps won eight golds at the 2008 Games, beating Mark Spitz's 1972 haul of seven; he retired with 28 Olympic medals, 23 of them gold, the most of any athlete.
Q 21The Arab Spring uprisings began in December 2010 in which country?
Tunisia
Tunisia: the self-immolation of street vendor Mohamed Bouazizi on 17 December 2010 sparked protests that toppled Ben Ali, then spread to Egypt, Libya, Yemen, Syria and Bahrain.
Q 22Osama bin Laden was killed by US Navy SEALs on May 2, 2011 in a compound in which Pakistani city?
Abbottabad
Abbottabad, home to Pakistan's military academy, was where SEAL Team Six stormed bin Laden's compound in Operation Neptune Spear; the raid took about 40 minutes and his body was buried at sea.
Q 23Which Japanese nuclear plant suffered a Level 7 accident in March 2011?
Fukushima Daiichi
Q 14Who was elected in November 2008 as America's first African American president?
Barack Obama
Barack Obama beat John McCain by 365 electoral votes to 173 on 4 November 2008, with Joe Biden as his running mate and Sarah Palin on the Republican ticket.
Q 15What name did bitcoin's pseudonymous creator use when mining the 'genesis block' on 3 January 2009?
Satoshi Nakamoto
Satoshi Nakamoto mined the genesis block on 3 January 2009, having posted the bitcoin white paper on 31 October 2008; the creator's real identity has never been confirmed.
Q 16In which city did Usain Bolt set his 9.58-second 100 m world record at the 2009 World Championships?
Berlin
Bolt ran 9.58 seconds in Berlin on 16 August 2009 and, four days later, set the 200 m world record of 19.19 at the same championships.
Q 17Which 2009 James Cameron film became the highest-grossing movie of all time?
Avatar
Avatar, set on the moon Pandora among the blue-skinned Na'vi, was the first film to gross more than $2 billion and finished near $2.9 billion after re-releases.
Q 18In which city does the Burj Khalifa, completed in 2010, stand?
Dubai
The Burj Khalifa in Dubai opened in January 2010 and rises 829.8 m over 163 floors, with 2,909 stairs from the ground to the 160th floor.
Q 19In which country is Eyjafjallajökull, whose 2010 eruption shut most of Europe's airspace for six days?
Iceland
Iceland's Eyjafjallajökull erupted in April 2010, and about 20 countries closed their skies from 15 to 20 April, stranding some 10 million travellers in the worst air-travel disruption since the Second World War.
Q 20The 2010 Deepwater Horizon rig explosion and oil spill happened in which body of water?
Gulf of Mexico
Gulf of Mexico: eleven workers died in the explosion on the BP-operated rig, and about 4.9 million barrels leaked over 87 days before the well was capped on 15 July 2010.
Fukushima Daiichi lost grid power and nearly all backup generators when the March 2011 Tōhoku quake and tsunami struck; three reactors melted down, and Level 7 on the INES scale has otherwise been reached only by Chernobyl.
Q 24Which country became the world's newest sovereign state on 9 July 2011?
South Sudan
South Sudan split from Sudan after a January 2011 independence referendum passed with 98.8% support; its capital is Juba.
Q 25NASA's car-sized Curiosity rover landed inside which Martian crater on August 6, 2012?
Gale
Gale crater: a rocket-powered 'sky crane' hovered about 20 metres up and lowered Curiosity on 7.5-metre nylon tethers; the rover then spent years climbing Mount Sharp at the crater's centre.
Q 26On 4 July 2012, CERN announced a new particle believed to be which long-sought boson?
Higgs
Peter Higgs and François Englert shared the 2013 Nobel Prize for predicting it. The 'God particle' nickname comes from a 1993 book and is disliked by physicists, Higgs included.
Q 27Jorge Mario Bergoglio, elected pope on 13 March 2013, was the first pope from which religious order?
The Jesuits
Bergoglio came from the Jesuits, the first pope of that order; as Francis he was also the first from Latin America and the first born outside Europe since the 8th century. He died on 21 April 2025.
Q 28Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 vanished on 8 March 2014 en route from Kuala Lumpur to which city?
Beijing
Beijing was its destination; the Boeing 777 carried 239 people. The first confirmed debris, a wing flaperon, washed up on Réunion in July 2015, but the main wreckage had not been found a decade on.
Q 29Who became the youngest Nobel laureate ever when she shared the 2014 Peace Prize at age 17?
Malala Yousafzai
Malala Yousafzai, shot by a Taliban gunman on her school bus in Pakistan's Swat Valley in October 2012, shared the 2014 Peace Prize with Indian children's rights campaigner Kailash Satyarthi.
Q 30What did LIGO detect for the first time on 14 September 2015, confirming Einstein's prediction?
Gravitational waves
Gravitational waves from two black holes merging about 1.3 billion light-years away produced the signal GW150914; Rainer Weiss, Barry Barish and Kip Thorne shared the 2017 Nobel Prize in Physics for the detection.