Getting your questions ready
Getting your questions ready
Beat the crowd
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100 free Bar trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
Bar trivia has a particular register: harder than a kids' quiz, easier than Jeopardy, and built so that a table of four with different jobs can each answer a few. This set is written to that level. It moves through the pub-quiz staples in turn: capitals that people get wrong (Canberra, Ottawa, Bern), the planets, the highest and largest of things, and the dates a host can lean on: 1912, 1889, 1937, 44 BC. The second half is where a bar quiz earns its keep. Which album gave us Bohemian Rhapsody, how many Oscars Titanic took home, why the wireless standard is called Bluetooth, which grain bourbon is made from, what Nintendo made in 1889 and where Monopoly's streets come from. Every question has four options and a one-line explanation, and every answer is cited to its source. Use it however you like: play it here on a phone, start a room so a group plays the same questions with a live scoreboard, or download the PDF with an answer key and read it out at your own trivia night.
30 of 100 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01What is the capital city of Australia?
Canberra
Canberra is the capital and the largest population centre in the Australian Capital Territory; Sydney and Melbourne are bigger but neither is the capital.
Q 02Which mountain is the highest on Earth above sea level?
Everest
Everest, called Sagarmatha in Nepal and Qomolangma in Tibet, is the highest point above sea level. K2 is second.
Q 03Which is the smallest sovereign state in the world by both area and population?
Vatican City
Vatican City covers 44 hectares and had a population of about 882 in 2024, making it the smallest by both measures.
Q 04Which planet is the largest in the Solar System?
Jupiter
Jupiter is the fifth planet from the Sun and the largest in the Solar System.
Q 05The chemical symbol Au stands for which element?
Gold
Au comes from the Latin word aurum, meaning gold. Silver is Ag, aluminium is Al and argon is Ar.
Q 06Roughly how many bones does an adult human skeleton have?
206
Babies are born with around 270 bones, which fuse to about 206 by adulthood, not counting accessory bones.
Q 07Who painted the Mona Lisa?
Leonardo da Vinci
The Mona Lisa is a half-length portrait by the Italian artist Leonardo da Vinci.
Q 08Who was the first person to walk on the Moon?
Neil Armstrong
Armstrong commanded Apollo 11 in 1969 and was the first person to walk on the Moon; Aldrin followed him down the ladder.
Q 09William Shakespeare was born and raised in which English town?
Stratford-upon-Avon
Shakespeare was born and raised in Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwickshire.
Q 10The Beatles were formed in which city?
Liverpool
Liverpool's Cavern Club hosted the Beatles nearly 300 times before fame; the band formed in the city in 1960.
Q 11In which year did the RMS Titanic sink?
1912
Titanic sank in the early hours of 15 April 1912 after hitting an iceberg on her maiden voyage from Southampton to New York.
Q 12The Berlin Wall encircled West Berlin from 1961 until which year?
1989
The Wall stood from 1961 to 1989, separating West Berlin from East Berlin and East Germany.
Q 13How many FIFA World Cup titles did Pelé win as a player?
Three
Pelé won the World Cup with Brazil in 1958, 1962 and 1970, the only player to win it three times.
Q 14Which swimmer has won more Olympic medals than any other athlete?
Q 21Albert Einstein won the 1921 Nobel Prize in Physics chiefly for his work on what?
The photoelectric effect
The citation was for services to theoretical physics and especially the discovery of the law of the photoelectric effect, not relativity.
Q 22Who was the first woman to win a Nobel Prize?
Marie Curie
Curie was the first woman to win a Nobel, the first person to win two, and the only person to win in two different sciences.
Q 23Which Scottish physician discovered penicillin in 1928?
Alexander Fleming
Fleming discovered penicillin in 1928 as a crude extract of a Penicillium mould.
Michael Phelps
Michael Phelps won 23 golds among his 28 medals, including eight at Beijing 2008 alone.
Q 15Which Dane designed the Sydney Opera House?
Jørn Utzon
Utzon won the 1957 design competition; the building was finished by an Australian team led by Peter Hall and opened in 1973.
Q 16The Inca citadel of Machu Picchu is in which country?
Peru
Machu Picchu is a 15th-century Inca citadel on a mountain ridge in southern Peru, about 2,430 metres up.
Q 17What is the largest hot desert in the world?
The Sahara
At about 9.2 million square kilometres, the Sahara is the largest hot desert; only the deserts of Antarctica and the Arctic are bigger overall.
Q 18Which ocean is the largest and deepest on Earth?
Pacific
The Pacific is the largest and deepest of Earth's five oceanic divisions.
Q 19Which planet is closest to the Sun?
Mercury
Mercury is the first planet from the Sun and the smallest in the Solar System.
Q 20Which chemical element is the most abundant in the universe?
Hydrogen
Hydrogen is the lightest element and makes up about 75% of all normal matter in the universe.
Q 24Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was born in which city?
Salzburg
Mozart was born in Salzburg and emerged as a child prodigy under his father Leopold.
Q 25How many novels are there in the main Harry Potter series?
Seven
Harry Potter is a series of seven children's fantasy novels by J. K. Rowling.
Q 26Who wrote the dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four?
George Orwell
George Orwell wrote it on the Scottish island of Jura while dying of tuberculosis; it was published in June 1949, seven months before his death.
Q 27Who directed the 1972 film The Godfather?
Francis Ford Coppola
Francis Ford Coppola directed all three Godfather films, co-writing each with Mario Puzo, whose 1969 novel started it all.
Q 28How many Academy Awards did the 1997 film Titanic win?
11
Titanic had fourteen nominations at the 70th Academy Awards and won eleven, including Best Picture and Best Director.
Q 29In the sitcom Friends, Rachel's first job is waitressing at which Manhattan coffee house?
Central Perk
Central Perk is where Rachel waits tables before moving on to Bloomingdale's and Ralph Lauren; Cafe Nervosa is the Frasier coffee shop.
Q 30The Simpsons is set in which fictional town?
Springfield
The show is set in the fictional town of Springfield, in an unspecified US location. Quahog is Family Guy; South Park is its own show.