Getting your questions ready
Getting your questions ready
Beat the crowd
10 questions No timer
49 free Dams trivia questions with answers — technology quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
Dams are among the biggest things humans have ever built, and this quiz covers them from the 3000 BCE Jawa Dam in Jordan to the 2020s. You will sort gravity dams from arch, buttress and embankment dams, place the tallest dam on Earth (a 305-metre arch in Sichuan) and the largest reservoir by surface area (Lake Volta), and meet the engineers, presidents and folk singers tangled up with Grand Coulee, Aswan, Itaipu, Kariba and Akosombo. The second half is about what happens when dams go wrong: the South Fork Dam and the Johnstown Flood, William Mulholland's St. Francis Dam, the Vajont landslide, the 1975 Banqiao collapse, the Teton Dam, Malpasset, the 2017 Oroville spillway evacuation, and the RAF's bouncing-bomb raid on the Möhne and Eder. Along the way: the beaver dam visible from space, the Bond stunt at the Contra Dam, Life magazine's first cover, and the Elwha and Klamath removals. Hoover Dam and the Three Gorges Dam each have their own quiz on BrainPickle, so they only get a passing mention here. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's articles on the individual dams and the sentence that supports it is attached to each question.
30 of 49 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which type of dam relies on its own sheer weight to hold back the water?
Gravity dam
The other main types are embankment dams built of earth and rock, buttress dams propped from behind, and arch dams that push the load into the valley walls.
Q 02An arch dam is curved in which direction?
Upstream, into the reservoir
The water pressure pushes on the convex face and squeezes the arch into its abutments, which is why the type suits narrow rock gorges and needs far less concrete.
Q 03The Jawa Dam, one of the earliest dams known, was built around 3000 BCE in which modern country?
Jordan
The Hittites followed with dams in Anatolia between the 17th and 13th centuries BCE, and the Romans began masonry gravity dams in the 1st century CE.
Q 04The Sadd el-Kafara, the oldest major dam in the world, was built near Cairo by which civilisation?
The ancient Egyptians
Its name means 'Dam of the Infidels'; it was never finished and was destroyed by a flood because it had no spillway.
Q 05Roughly what share of the world's arable land is irrigated with water from reservoirs behind dams?
About 20%
Irrigation, hydropower, water supply, flood control, navigation and fish farming are the main jobs dams do.
Q 06The 305 m Jinping-I, the world's tallest dam when finished in 2014, is in which country?
China
It sits on the Yalong River in Sichuan and was finished in 2014, edging out the Nurek Dam for the record.
Q 07Nurek Dam, the world's tallest when finished in 1980, is in which former Soviet republic?
Tajikistan
Completed in 1980 on the Vakhsh River, it held the overall height record until Jinping-I overtook it in 2013.
Q 08The Grande Dixence Dam, the tallest dam in Europe at 285 metres, stands in which country?
Switzerland
It holds back the Lac des Dix in the canton of Valais and is also the tallest gravity-type dam anywhere in the world.
Q 09Lake Volta, Earth's largest artificial reservoir by surface area, lies entirely in which country?
Ghana
The Akosombo Dam that created it was built mainly to power an aluminium smelter, and the lake covers 3.6% of the country's land.
Q 10Which Zambezi reservoir is the world's largest man-made body of water by volume?
Lake Kariba
It holds about 185 cubic kilometres of water; the dam that forms it was opened by the Queen Mother in 1960.
Q 11The Itaipu Dam on the Paraná River is a joint project of which two countries?
Brazil and Paraguay
Ten of its twenty generators run at 50 Hz for one partner and ten at 60 Hz for the other; in 1994 the American Society of Civil Engineers named it one of the seven modern Wonders of the World.
Q 12The reservoir of the Itaipu Dam inundated which waterfall, then the world's largest by volume?
Guaíra Falls
Brazil later abolished the national park that had protected the falls; the dam's name comes from a Guarani word meaning 'the sounding stone'.
Q 13Grand Coulee Dam, the largest power station in the United States by capacity, is in which state?
Washington
Q 21Jawaharlal Nehru called which Indian dam a 'New Temple of Resurgent India'?
Bhakra Dam
Nehru poured the symbolic first bucket of concrete into the Sutlej riverbed in November 1955; the dam forms the Gobind Sagar reservoir.
Q 22Oroville Dam, the tallest dam in the United States at 770 feet, holds back which river?
The Feather
In February 2017 its damaged spillways forced the evacuation of about 188,000 people living downstream.
Q 23Glen Canyon Dam forms which reservoir, named for the first man to boat through the Grand Canyon?
Lake Powell
The dam is the ultimate target of the saboteurs in Edward Abbey's 1975 novel The Monkey Wrench Gang.
Franklin Roosevelt endorsed the 'high dam' design in 1934, and its third powerhouse in 1974 pushed capacity to 6,809 MW.
Q 14Which folk singer wrote 26 songs in a month in 1941, including 'Roll On, Columbia', while promoting the Columbia dams?
Woody Guthrie
The Bonneville Power Administration hired him for a documentary that needed a narrator, and got a songbook instead.
Q 15The Aswan High Dam, built between 1960 and 1970, was developed with the help of which country?
The Soviet Union
The United States had withdrawn its funding offer in 1956; the finished dam created Lake Nasser and was then the largest power station in Africa.
Q 16Which was the most famous of the 22 monuments relocated from Lake Nasser under UNESCO?
The Abu Simbel temples
The rock temples of Ramesses II were cut into blocks and reassembled on higher ground beside the new lake.
Q 17The Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam, Africa's largest hydroelectric plant, sits on which river?
The Blue Nile
Egypt, 2,500 km downstream, has opposed it throughout its 2011-2025 construction and its five reservoir fillings.
Q 18Which dynasty built the Kallanai on the Kaveri River, India's oldest dam still in use, around 150 CE?
The Chola
King Karikala's stone dam diverted the river into the delta for irrigation and was remodelled by British engineers in the 1800s.
Q 19The great dam of Marib, first built in the 8th century BC, is in which modern country?
Yemen
It watered the capital of the Sabaean kingdom of Sheba; its final breach in the 6th century is remembered in the Quran.
Q 20The tallest dam the Romans ever built, at Subiaco near Rome, was created around 60 CE for what purpose?
Emperor Nero's pleasure lakes
At 40 metres it stayed the tallest dam anywhere in the world until the late Middle Ages.
Q 24Margaret Bourke-White's photo of which dam's spillway was the first cover of Life magazine in 1936?
Fort Peck Dam
The Montana dam is the largest hydraulically filled dam in the US, and its lake has more shoreline than California's coast.
Q 25The largest earth-filled dam in the world, Tarbela, holds back which river?
The Indus
It sits in Pakistan's Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province where the river leaves the Himalayan foothills, and was completed in 1976.
Q 26The largest known beaver dam, some 775 metres long, is in which Canadian national park?
Wood Buffalo
Beavers build mostly at night, carrying mud in their forepaws and timber in their teeth, and can move their own body weight in material.
Q 27The morning-glory spillway known as the 'Glory Hole' is a famous feature of which California dam?
Monticello Dam
The funnel is 72 feet across at the lip of Lake Berryessa and narrows to about 28 feet before spitting water out below the dam.
Q 28The opening bungee jump of the 1995 James Bond film GoldenEye was performed off which Swiss dam?
Contra Dam
The 220-metre arch dam on the Verzasca River became a bungee venue afterwards; a 2002 poll voted the jump the best movie stunt ever.
Q 29Operation Chastise, the 1943 'Dambusters' raid, breached which two German dams?
Möhne and Eder
The Sorpe was only lightly damaged; 617 Squadron lost eight Lancasters and 53 aircrew, and the flooding killed about 1,600 civilians.
Q 30Who designed the bouncing bomb used against the German dams in 1943?
Barnes Wallis
The weapon was code-named Upkeep, and the raid was led by 24-year-old Wing Commander Guy Gibson.