Blood Donation Trivia
0Loading crowd target
0Loading crowd target
6correct to beat the crowd
50 free Blood Donation trivia questions with answers — science & nature quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
Giving blood is one of the few medical procedures most healthy adults can take part in, yet most donors know little about what happens after the bag is sealed. Components are split, chilled, frozen or kept warm and rocking, tested against a short list of infections, and used within days, weeks or months depending on what they are. These 50 questions cover the whole journey: eligibility and the gap between donations, what a unit is used for, plasma and platelet collection by apheresis, World Blood Donor Day, the wartime and Red Cross origins of the donor service and the blood bank, storage limits, screening tests and the donor policies that have changed in recent years. A few reach into the record-setting donors and the experiments of the 1600s and 1900s. Most are pitched for a general audience, with a handful for people who work in transfusion or simply collect medical history. Play on your phone with instant answers and explanations, or print it for a classroom, a donor-drive quiz night or a health-awareness event.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Charles Drew, who led the 1940 Blood for Britain plasma drive, condemned which wartime Red Cross practice as unscientific?
Segregating donations by race
Segregating donations by race replaced an outright ban on Black donors, under which Drew himself could not have given blood to the programme he had helped to build.
Q 02Donated platelets last only about five days because, unlike red cells, they are stored how?
At room temperature
At room temperature, rocked constantly so they don't clump, platelets are more open to bacterial growth than chilled blood, which is why they have to be used within about five days.
Q 03Why does blood donation use a large 16- or 17-gauge needle rather than a finer one?
To avoid shearing red cells
To avoid shearing red cells: forced through a narrow needle, the cells can rupture. The wide bore also lets a pint flow out in about ten minutes.
Q 04According to the American Red Cross, someone in the United States needs blood roughly how often?
Every two seconds
Every two seconds, the Red Cross says, and because blood cannot be manufactured, each of those units has to come out of another person's arm.
Q 05What did US blood banks see in the weeks after the September 11 attacks, as after other national disasters?
A surplus of donations
A surplus of donations followed 9/11: far more blood was given than the survivors could use, so an unusually large share of it expired on the shelf and had to be thrown away.
Q 06In which country do blood donors get the day of their donation as a paid holiday from work?
Italy
Italy's 2005 blood law lets employees take the whole day of a donation off on normal pay, and a donor turned away as unfit is still paid for the time the check took.
Q 07Which religion's ban on blood transfusions has made bloodless surgery and blood substitutes especially important for its members?
Jehovah's Witnesses
Jehovah's Witnesses take the Bible's command to 'abstain from blood' to rule out transfusions, and describe the stand as a religious rather than a medical one.
Q 08Directed donations from relatives are widely believed safer, so why can they be less safe?
Donors may hide risk factors
Donors may hide risk factors when a loved one is counting on them, and studies have found more positive infection markers in directed units than in blood from repeat community donors.
Q 09In 1997 the World Health Organization set a goal that every blood donation should come from which kind of donor?
Unpaid volunteers
Unpaid volunteers are the target because bloodborne infections are rarest among them, yet when the WHO surveyed 124 countries in 2006 only 49 relied on them entirely.
Q 10O negative is the universal donor for red cells, but which blood group is the universal donor for plasma?
Group AB
Group AB plasma has neither anti-A nor anti-B antibodies, so it can go to a patient of any type, and with only about 4% of Americans in the group it is usually in short supply.
Q 11Which anticoagulant did Albert Hustin and Luis Agote separately use in 1914 for the first indirect blood transfusions?
Sodium citrate
Sodium citrate binds the calcium that blood needs to clot, so a donor's blood could for the first time be bottled and carried to the patient instead of flowing arm to arm.
Q 12In which 1930s conflict did Frederic Durán-Jordà's transfusion service send bottled blood to the front in refrigerated vehicles?
Spanish Civil War
The Spanish Civil War service drew its blood from volunteers answering radio appeals in Barcelona, then bottled it and drove it chilled some 200 km to the Aragon front.
Q 13Why does the American Red Cross require blood donors to weigh at least 110 pounds?
Q 21The first blood banks are older than many assume: US Army doctor Oswald Robertson set them up during which conflict?
First World War
The First World War depots, stocked in 1917 with bottles of stored blood ready for the wounded, earned Robertson the credit as developer of the first blood bank, and a British DSO.
Q 22In 1916 Peyton Rous and Joseph Turner found that adding which sugar to treated blood let it be stored for later use?
Glucose
Glucose joined the anticoagulant in what became known as the Rous–Turner solution, so blood no longer had to pass straight from donor to patient: it could wait in a bottle until it was needed.
Q 23Carl Walter and W. P. Murphy Jr. replaced the breakable glass bottle for blood collection in 1950 with what?
Less blood volume
Less blood volume: a pint is a bigger share of a light donor's supply, and to give a double unit of red cells takes at least 130 pounds for men and 150 for women.
Q 14Along with hepatitis B, hepatitis C and HIV, which infection rounds out the WHO's four core tests for donated blood?
Syphilis
Syphilis serology is the fourth basic test, yet in 2006 the WHO reported that 56 of 124 countries surveyed did not run the four on every donation.
Q 15Donated plasma is normally yellow; which pigment, also behind jaundice, is a main reason for the colour?
Bilirubin
Bilirubin helps give plasma its straw colour, and extra turns it deep yellow. A green unit can come instead from a donor on the contraceptive pill, whose blood carries more of a copper-binding protein.
Q 16Since a May 2023 FDA change, which trait no longer decides whether a man may give blood in the US?
His sexual orientation
His sexual orientation no longer matters: since the FDA's May 2023 guidance every US donor answers the same questions about recent sexual activity, whoever their partners are.
Q 17Which Canadian province runs its own blood operator instead of joining Canadian Blood Services, set up in 1998?
Quebec
Quebec set up Héma-Québec in 1998, the year the Krever inquiry into Canada's tainted-blood scandal led the country to take its blood supply out of the Red Cross's hands.
Q 18Which supplement cuts the number of donors turned away for low haemoglobin, though it often upsets the stomach?
Iron
Iron leaves the body with every donation, so regular donors who don't replace it can run short; trials found that supplements cut deferrals, at the price of more constipation and nausea.
Q 19World Blood Donor Day, 14 June, marks the birthday of the scientist who discovered what?
ABO blood groups
ABO blood groups were described in 1901 by Karl Landsteiner, born 14 June 1868, who saw that mismatched human blood could explain the shock that followed some early transfusions; it won him the 1930 Nobel Prize.
Q 20The world's first blood donor service began in 1921 in which city, run from Red Cross worker Percy Oliver's home?
London
London's service began after Oliver answered a hospital's urgent call for blood in 1921, and the panel of tested donors he then ran from his own house became the model copied across Britain and abroad.
A plastic bag
A plastic bag made it safe and easy to split a single unit of whole blood into several components, which reshaped what one donation could supply.
Q 24The 1940 Blood for Britain project collected plasma for shipment across the Atlantic from hospitals where?
New York City
New York City hospitals gave 14,556 donations by January 1941; Charles Drew was called back to run the project once it became clear that each hospital needed to collect and test its plasma the same way.
Q 25Richard Titmuss's 1970 book comparing Britain's voluntary and America's commercial blood systems had what title?
The Gift Relationship
The Gift Relationship argued that giving blood freely builds social solidarity while a market in blood erodes it, a case since carried into arguments over the sale of kidneys.
Q 26Which country takes whole-blood donations in units of 200 or 400 millilitres, where Americans give about a pint?
Japan
Japan now steers donors away from its own smaller size: hospitals have less and less use for 200 mL units, so anyone who meets the age and weight rules is asked to give 400 mL instead.
Q 27Why can US plasma donors give twice a week when whole-blood donors must wait eight weeks?
Their red cells are returned
Their red cells are returned by the machine, so donors lose only plasma, and US rules allow two donations a week, which adds up to a nominal 83 litres a year.
Q 28Donated plasma is frozen within hours of collection mainly to protect what?
Its clotting factors
Its clotting factors are what patients need it for, so plasma is frozen fast and then keeps for a year; under US rules only plasma in the freezer within eight hours counts as 'fresh frozen'.
Q 29Judith Graham Pool's 1960s discovery of cryoprecipitate, a concentrate made from frozen plasma, transformed the treatment of which inherited disease?
Haemophilia
Haemophilia became far easier to treat: Pool found that the protein patients lack settles out when frozen plasma is thawed slowly in the cold, which gave doctors a concentrated dose for the first time.
Q 30The Rh factor in blood typing, the 'positive' or 'negative' after your group, is named after which animal?
Rhesus monkey
Rhesus monkey red cells, injected into rabbits, produced a serum that also clumped most people's blood, and those people were labelled Rh-positive; the human factor later proved not quite the same as the monkey's.