9th Grade Trivia
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154 free 9th Grade trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
This 9th grade trivia quiz is built around what a typical freshman actually studies: Algebra I (slope, linear and quadratic equations, primes, the Pythagorean theorem), Biology (cells, photosynthesis, mitosis, DNA, Mendel and Darwin, food chains), World History (Mesopotamia and Egypt through Greece, Rome, the Renaissance, the French Revolution, the Industrial Revolution and World War I) and English (Romeo and Juliet, To Kill a Mockingbird, Of Mice and Men, The Odyssey, Lord of the Flies, Animal Farm and The Great Gatsby). If you want the wider school experience rather than the syllabus, our high school trivia quiz covers that. The easy questions are the ones any 14-year-old should get: what a prime number is, which family Juliet belongs to, who wrote On the Origin of Species. From there it climbs to the things that separate an A from a B: the year Mendel published, why the Bastille held only seven prisoners, what the discriminant tells you, which emperor moved the capital to Byzantium. Teachers can use it as a review game; parents can use it to check whether they still remember freshman year. Every answer was checked against the encyclopaedia entry for the topic before publishing, and the sentence that supports it is stored with each question.
30 of 154 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01What do we call a whole number greater than 1 that has more than two factors?
Composite
Composite numbers can be made by multiplying smaller whole numbers, as 12 = 3 × 4; the number 1 is neither prime nor composite, since its only factor is itself.
Q 02Slope is defined as the ratio of which two things?
Rise to run
Rise to run: slope is the change in y divided by the change in x between two points on a line, so a level line has slope zero.
Q 03What name is given to the highest or lowest point of a parabola, where the curve turns?
Vertex
The vertex is where a parabola turns and crosses its axis of symmetry, so the curve on one side is a mirror image of the other.
Q 04In ax² + bx + c = 0, what is the name given to c?
Constant coefficient
c is the constant coefficient, or constant term: a is the quadratic coefficient and b the linear coefficient, and if a were zero the equation would just be linear.
Q 05Which method is used to derive the quadratic formula?
Completing the square
Completing the square: you rewrite ax² + bx + c = 0 so the left side is a perfect square equal to a constant, then take the square root and solve for x.
Q 06The Pythagorean theorem relates the three sides of which kind of triangle?
Right
Right triangles alone obey the rule, and Greece was not the only place to find it: India's Baudhayana Sulba-sutra, written between 800 and 400 BC, states it too.
Q 07What is the longest side of a triangle with a 90-degree angle called?
Hypotenuse
The hypotenuse is always the longest side; its name is Greek for 'stretching under', because it stretches beneath the triangle's 90-degree angle.
Q 08Besides geometry, Pythagoras is traditionally credited with finding the mathematical ratios behind which art?
Music
Music: legend has Pythagoras hearing blacksmiths' hammers ring in harmony, and his followers taught that pleasing intervals come from simple ratios such as 2 to 1.
Q 09Which civilisation used the Pythagorean rule over a thousand years before Pythagoras?
Babylonians
Babylonians were listing Pythagorean triples on the clay tablet Plimpton 322 around 1800 BC, so the rule carries the name of a Greek born over a millennium after it was in use.
Q 10The word 'algebra' comes from which language?
Arabic
Arabic gave us al-jabr, a word that named both a step in solving equations and, among medieval doctors, the setting of broken bones.
Q 11Which 9th-century scholar's treatise on solving equations gave algebra its name?
Al-Khwarizmi
Al-Khwarizmi's treatise of around 820 gave algebra its name; his own name, Latinised as Algoritmi, became the word algorithm.
Q 12In the order-of-operations mnemonic PEMDAS, what does the E stand for?
Exponents
Exponents come straight after parentheses, which is why 2 × 3² equals 18 rather than 36: the squaring is done before the multiplying.
Q 13Who proved around 300 BC that there are infinitely many primes?
Euclid
Euclid's proof in the Elements shows no finite list of primes is complete: multiply them all together, add 1, and the result has a prime factor missing from the list.
Q 21Bacteria and archaea belong to which broad group of single-celled organisms?
Prokaryotes
Prokaryotes keep their DNA loose in the cell with no membrane around it; archaea look so like bacteria that they were classed with them until Carl Woese's gene studies split them apart in 1977.
Q 22Which organelle stores an animal cell's chromosomes?
Nucleus
The nucleus keeps the chromosomes behind a double membrane whose pores control what passes in and out, letting copied genetic messages leave while the DNA stays put.
Q 23What gas do plants release as a by-product of photosynthesis?
Oxygen
The oxygen comes from splitting water molecules in the light-dependent reactions, not from the carbon dioxide the plant takes in.
Q 14What is the only even prime number?
2
Every other even number is divisible by 2, so every other prime is odd.
Q 15Which ancient Greek, who also measured the Earth's circumference, devised the 'sieve' for finding prime numbers?
Eratosthenes
The sieve of Eratosthenes, devised in the 3rd century BC, lists primes by writing out the numbers and crossing off every multiple of each prime you find.
Q 16On a graph, the solutions of an equation such as y = 2x + 1 form what shape?
A straight line
A straight line: y climbs by the same amount for every step along x, so the points never curve, which is why equations like this are called linear.
Q 17Which form of algebra, taught in schools, uses variables to stand for unspecified values?
Elementary
Elementary algebra swaps the fixed numbers of arithmetic for letters such as x, so a single rule can be written once and cover every case.
Q 18What name is given to the proteins that speed up chemical reactions inside living things?
Enzymes
Enzymes lower the energy a reaction needs to get started and come out of it unchanged, so one enzyme molecule can do the same job again and again.
Q 19Who first described cells in 1665 after studying a thin slice of cork under a microscope?
Robert Hooke
Robert Hooke saw a honeycomb of tiny cavities in the cork and called them cells in his 1665 book Micrographia, the first use of the word for a unit of life.
Q 20Which organelles provide energy for cell functions?
Mitochondria
Mitochondria are the cell's powerhouses, where cellular respiration breaks down glucose to release usable energy; plant cells have mitochondria as well as chloroplasts.
Q 24Which plant pigment absorbs red and blue light and reflects green?
Chlorophyll
Chlorophyll reflects green light, so leaves look green; when it breaks down in autumn, the yellow and orange pigments it was masking finally show through.
Q 25What is the name of the light-independent reactions that build sugars in plants?
Calvin cycle
The Calvin cycle uses the energy carriers made in the light-dependent stage to fix carbon dioxide into three-carbon sugars, which the plant then builds into glucose.
Q 26In which part of the chloroplast do the light-dependent reactions of photosynthesis occur?
Thylakoid membranes
Thylakoid membranes, stacked like coins inside the chloroplast, trap light and use its energy to split water and charge the energy-carrying molecules that power sugar-making.
Q 27What molecule stores the chemical energy produced by cellular respiration?
ATP
ATP, adenosine triphosphate, stores the energy released by respiration in its phosphate bonds; breaking off the third phosphate powers most of the work a cell does.
Q 28Which first stage of cellular respiration takes place in the cell's cytosol?
Glycolysis
Glycolysis, literally 'sugar splitting', breaks one glucose into two pyruvate molecules in the cytosol and works with or without oxygen.
Q 29Which type of cell division halves the chromosome number to produce eggs and sperm?
Meiosis
Meiosis copies the DNA once but divides twice, so its four cells each carry half the usual chromosomes; fertilisation then restores the full set.
Q 30Which mitosis stage sees daughter chromosomes pulled toward opposite ends of the cell?
Anaphase
Anaphase starts when the link holding each pair of copies is cut and the spindle fibres abruptly shorten, hauling one copy to each end so both new cells get a full set.