Common Misconceptions Trivia
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99 free Common Misconceptions trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Some facts are so familiar that nobody checks them: Napoleon was tiny, goldfish forget everything in three seconds, you can see the Great Wall from space. Each one is wrong, and the true version is usually stranger than the myth. These fifty questions take the things everyone 'knows' and ask what the evidence really says, from the colour of the Sun to who actually built the light bulb, with every answer backed by a cited source and a one-line explanation of where the myth came from. It is built for people who like being surprised: pub quiz setters who want a round that trips up the confident, teachers hunting for a lesson on checking sources, and anyone who has ever lost an argument to a fact that turned out to be false.
30 of 99 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01What did Yang Liwei, China's first astronaut, report about seeing the Great Wall of China from orbit?
He could not see it
He could not see it, and NASA agrees: the wall is barely visible from low orbit even in perfect conditions and no more conspicuous than many other man-made objects. From the Moon, none of it can be seen.
Q 02Napoleon stood roughly 1.67 metres; how did that compare with Frenchmen of his era, despite the cartoons?
About average
About average is right: his recorded 5 feet 2 was in old French units, nearer 5 feet 6 or 7 in English ones, and British cartoonist James Gillray's tiny, tantrum-prone 'Little Boney' did the rest.
Q 03Bulls cannot pick out red as a bright colour, so what actually draws the charge in a bullfight?
The cape's movement
The cape's movement is the trigger: when MythBusters stood a motionless man in red in the ring in 2007, the bull ignored him and went after the cowboys who were moving.
Q 04Goldfish, said to forget everything within seconds, actually have a memory span of at least how long?
Three months
Three months is the floor for a goldfish's memory, and they can tell shapes, colours and sounds apart; on MythBusters, trained fish still ran an underwater obstacle course more than a month later.
Q 05Albert Einstein, far from failing maths, taught himself algebra and which subject at age twelve?
Calculus
Calculus was mastered 'before I was fifteen', as Einstein put it in 1935 when shown a Ripley's column claiming he had failed maths; he had found his own proof of the Pythagorean theorem at twelve.
Q 06Which two of the usual seven continents does the six-continent model used in Russia merge into one?
Europe and Asia
Europe and Asia become Eurasia in that model, while Greece and many Romance-speaking countries, including Latin America, also count six by merging the Americas instead.
Q 07In Mary Shelley's novel, Frankenstein is the name of which figure, rather than of the creature?
The scientist
The scientist is Victor Frankenstein; his nameless creation was already being called 'Frankenstein' by 1908, and James Whale's 1931 film fixed the mix-up for good.
Q 08Which New York landmark is hit by lightning about 23 times a year, refuting 'it never strikes twice'?
Empire State Building
The Empire State Building averages 23 strikes a year because lightning favours the most prominent, conductive object in reach, so tall towers are hit again and again.
Q 09How much of the human brain is in use over a day, contrary to the famous ten percent claim?
Nearly all
Nearly all of it: neurologist Barry Gordon puts it as using virtually every part of the brain, most of it active almost all the time. The myth is often pinned on Albert Einstein, who never said it.
Q 10Viewed from space, above the atmosphere, what colour does the Sun actually appear to an astronaut?
White
White is the true colour: the Sun emits across the whole visible spectrum and that mix reads as white outside the atmosphere, with scattering painting it yellow, orange or red near the horizon.
Q 11Horned helmets, never found in a Viking dig, entered popular culture through whose Norse operas?
Richard Wagner
Richard Wagner's Ring cycle was staged in the 1870s with horned helmets by costume designer Carl Emil Doepler, and the image stuck.
Q 12Chameleons, which rarely match their backdrop, change colour to regulate heat and, most often, for what purpose?
Social signalling
Social signalling is the main job: a chameleon's colour tracks its mood and its messages to other chameleons, not the leaf behind it.
Q 13Sugar is blamed for hyperactive children, yet a 2019 review of trials tied it to which effect within an hour?
Greater fatigue
Q 21Scholars in 1492 knew the world was round; what did they say Christopher Columbus had misjudged?
The distance to the Indies
The distance to the Indies was the sticking point: his critics feared the East Indies lay far farther west than he presumed, and they were right; only the unexpected Americas saved his crews.
Q 22The apple of Eden is often traced to Latin 'malum', which meant apple and, with a different vowel length, what else?
Evil
Evil and apple were near-twins in Latin, a pun open to anyone reading Genesis in the Vulgate, although the Hebrew text names no species and says only 'fruit'.
Q 23Which philosopher's memoirs, written while Marie Antoinette was a child, already contained 'let them eat cake'?
Rousseau
Greater fatigue and lower alertness followed sugar in a pooled analysis of 31 studies, which found no lift in mood at any point; double-blind trials likewise find children behave no differently.
Q 14Donald Unger cracked only his left-hand knuckles for decades to test for which feared ailment?
Arthritis
Arthritis never appeared in either hand, a result Unger published in Arthritis & Rheumatism in 1998 and for which he won the 2009 Ig Nobel Prize in Medicine.
Q 15Which sense beyond the classic five lets you touch your nose with eyes closed, as in a sobriety test?
Proprioception
Proprioception is the sense of where your limbs are without looking, fed by stretch sensors in the muscles, tendons and joints, which is how a finger finds your nose in the dark.
Q 16The discredited 'tongue map' wrongly confined which taste to the tip of the tongue?
Sweet
Sweet, like every taste, registers all over the tongue; the map grew from Edwin Boring's 1942 graph of a 1901 German study, which made small differences in sensitivity look like separate zones.
Q 17Britain's wartime claim that carrots gave its pilots night vision was cover for which new technology?
Radar
Radar was the real secret behind the RAF's night victories, and the carrot tale also suited the 'Dig for Victory' drive, which urged a rationed public to eat more of the home-grown vegetable.
Q 18What actually happens to swallowed chewing gum, rumoured to sit in the stomach for seven years?
It passes out intact
It passes out intact: the gum base resists digestion, but the gut's normal housekeeping waves push it through all the same, and it emerges, as one doctor put it, 'pretty unmolested'.
Q 19The Coriolis force is too weak to steer a draining sink, so what mostly decides the spin direction?
The shape of the basin
The shape of the basin, the drain geometry and whatever motion the water already had are orders of magnitude stronger than Coriolis; identical toilets flushed in both hemispheres drain the same way.
Q 20Owing to the equatorial bulge, which Ecuadorian summit is the point on Earth's surface farthest from its centre?
Chimborazo
Chimborazo's summit sits about 2.1 km farther from the centre of the planet than Everest's, because Earth bulges at the equator and Chimborazo stands almost on it, barely a degree or so to the south.
Rousseau's Confessions gives the line to 'a great princess' and says brioche, not cake; Marie Antoinette was then a child in Austria, so she is unlikely to be the princess he meant.
Q 24Whose Gateshead home was the world's first with working light bulbs, before he merged firms with Edison?
Joseph Swan
Joseph Swan's house at Low Fell was the first anywhere with working bulbs, and his strong British patents pushed the rival firms into the 1883 Edison & Swan United Electric Light Company, 'Ediswan'.
Q 25Twinkies, rumoured to last for decades, actually carry an official shelf life of roughly how long?
45 days
45 days is the limit today, and before stronger preservatives arrived in 2012 it was just 26 days; the legend of a snack lasting ten, fifty or a hundred years is pure urban myth.
Q 26Why can harvestmen, the 'daddy longlegs' of legend, not be the most venomous animal alive?
They have no venom glands
They have no venom glands at all: a harvestman's chelicerae are grasping claws, not hollow fangs, and usually too weak to break human skin, which makes the creature harmless.
Q 27A camel's humps, widely believed to be water tanks, actually hold a reserve of what?
Fat
Fat is what fills the humps, a food reserve for lean times; a camel goes many days without drinking, helped instead by oval red blood cells that keep flowing as its body dries out.
Q 28Which French tune of 1761, now 'Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star', did Mozart merely write variations on?
Ah! vous dirai-je, maman
'Ah! vous dirai-je, maman' first appeared in print in 1761, when Mozart was five; he wrote his Twelve Variations on the tune some twenty years later, in his mid-twenties.
Q 29Deoxygenated blood in human veins, whatever the textbook diagrams show, is actually what colour?
Deep red
Deep red is the true shade, thanks to haemoglobin; blood in the arteries is a brighter red, and veins only look blue because of the way the skin above them filters and scatters light.
Q 30Old windows thicker at the bottom are cited as proof that glass flows; what actually explains the sag?
Imperfect manufacturing
Imperfect manufacturing left those sags and ripples in the pane the day it was made; once solidified, glass stops flowing, and medieval panes at Westminster Abbey creep at most a nanometre per billion years.