Energy Trivia
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This energy trivia quiz has 100 free questions with answers and runs from the physics classroom to the power plant. It covers the units (joule, watt, horsepower, kilowatt-hour, calorie), the laws of thermodynamics, kinetic and potential energy, and the men who named them, then moves through the history of how we make power: Volta's pile, Faraday's dynamo, Edison's Pearl Street station and the war of the currents, the first oil well, the first wind turbines and solar cells, Fermi's pile under a football stadium, and the first nuclear plant to feed a grid. The easy questions ask what unit your electricity bill uses, what the Sun runs on and where Hoover Dam is. The medium ones cover the 1973 oil embargo, Chernobyl and Fukushima, the world's biggest power station and the countries that run almost entirely on geothermal, wind or nuclear power. The hard ones want the depth of the Drake Well, the voltage of an electric eel, ITER's power target and the oldest Nobel laureate in history. Every answer has been checked against a reference encyclopaedia, and each question shows its explanation and citation once you have answered.
30 of 100 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01The SI unit of energy is named after which English physicist?
James Prescott Joule
James Prescott Joule, a brewer and amateur scientist, let falling weights turn a paddle wheel in an insulated tank and showed that the work done always produced the same amount of heat.
Q 02The term 'horsepower' was adopted in the late 18th century by which engineer to sell his steam engines?
James Watt
James Watt used horsepower to compare his engines with the draft horses they replaced; the unit of power that later displaced it, the watt, was named after him.
Q 03In which year did Einstein publish the paper establishing mass-energy equivalence, E = mc²?
1905
It was one of his four 'miracle year' papers; the paper actually says a body giving off energy L loses mass L/c², rather than writing the famous formula.
Q 04In which city did Thomas Edison open Pearl Street Station, his first commercial power plant in the United States, in 1882?
New York
New York: Pearl Street's six dynamos lit part of lower Manhattan until a fire in 1890 destroyed all but one of them, and the survivor is now a museum piece in Dearborn, Michigan.
Q 05The world's first nuclear power plant to feed electricity into a grid, in 1954, was in which country?
Soviet Union
Soviet Union: its small Obninsk plant began supplying electricity in June 1954, three years after an American test reactor in Idaho had generated the first, trivial amount of nuclear electricity.
Q 06The world's largest power station by installed capacity, at 22,500 megawatts, sits on which river?
Yangtze
Yangtze: the Three Gorges reservoir is so vast that NASA scientists calculated its mass lengthens Earth's day by 0.06 microseconds.
Q 07The Chernobyl explosion of 26 April 1986 destroyed which of the plant's reactors?
Unit 4
Unit 4 blew up during a test of how its cooling pumps would cope with a power cut; the plant's other reactors kept running for years, the last until December 2000.
Q 08Besides Chernobyl, which nuclear accident was rated level 7 on the International Nuclear Event Scale?
Fukushima Daiichi (2011)
Fukushima Daiichi (2011): three reactor cores melted after the tsunami from the Tōhoku earthquake swamped the plant, and Japan rated the accident lower at first, raising it to 7 a month later.
Q 09The 1973 oil embargo punished countries that backed Israel in which war?
The Yom Kippur War
The Yom Kippur War: Arab oil producers cut off the United States for resupplying Israel, the price of oil roughly quadrupled, and America adopted a national 55 mph speed limit to save fuel.
Q 10The first commercial oil well in the United States, drilled by Edwin Drake in 1859, is in which state?
Pennsylvania
Pennsylvania later voted Drake an annuity: he never patented his drilling method, lost his money and ended up poor while others made fortunes from oil.
Q 11How deep was Edwin Drake's pioneering 1859 oil well?
About 70 feet
Modern wells routinely go down several kilometres; Drake's success mattered because it prompted enough drilling nearby to supply real businesses.
Q 12Which Italian scientist built the first electric battery around 1800 from a stack of zinc and copper discs?
Alessandro Volta
Alessandro Volta built his pile to settle an argument with Luigi Galvani, who believed the twitching of frogs' legs revealed an 'animal electricity'; the volt is named after him.
Q 13John B. Goodenough became the oldest Nobel laureate at 97 by sharing the 2019 chemistry prize for what?
Lithium-ion batteries
Q 21Which French physicist first demonstrated the photovoltaic effect in 1839, aged 19?
Edmond Becquerel
Edmond Becquerel was experimenting with metal electrodes in a conducting solution in his father's laboratory when he found that light made a current flow, the principle behind every solar cell.
Q 22The first practical silicon solar cell was publicly demonstrated in 1954 at which research institution?
Bell Laboratories
Bell Laboratories' silicon cell, by Daryl Chapin, Calvin Fuller and Gerald Pearson, succeeded where Charles Fritts's selenium cells of 1883 had not: those turned only about 1 percent of sunlight into electricity, too little to be practical.
Q 23In which country did James Blyth build a wind-powered machine to light his holiday home in July 1887?
Lithium-ion batteries: Goodenough's 1980 cobalt-oxide cathode lifted the first lithium cell from about two volts to four, and Akira Yoshino built on it to make the first commercially viable version in 1985.
Q 14Which fish delivers the strongest electric shock of any animal, up to 860 volts?
Electric eel
Electric eel: despite the name it is a knifefish, not a true eel, and the 860-volt record belongs to a species that scientists only told apart from its relatives in 2019.
Q 15ITER, the giant international fusion experiment, is the world's largest example of which type of reactor?
Tokamak
Tokamak: ITER's is designed to release 500 megawatts of fusion power from 50 megawatts of heating, and the project grew out of a 1985 summit between Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev.
Q 16The Sun shines by fusing hydrogen in its core into which element?
Helium
Helium: the Sun has been making it for about 4.6 billion years, and when its core hydrogen runs low in roughly five billion more it will swell into a red giant.
Q 17How long does light from the Sun take to reach Earth?
About 8 minutes
About 8 minutes: sunlight takes roughly 8 minutes 20 seconds to cross the 150 million km to Earth, so we always see the Sun as it was eight minutes earlier.
Q 18A calorie is the heat needed to warm one gram of what by one degree Celsius?
Water
Water: the energy in food was first measured by burning a sample in a sealed 'bomb calorimeter' surrounded by water and reading how far the water's temperature rose.
Q 19Which process powers every commercial nuclear power station today?
Nuclear fission
Nuclear fission was discovered in 1938 by Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann and explained by Lise Meitner and her nephew Otto Frisch, yet only Hahn received the Nobel Prize for it.
Q 20In which country does geothermal energy heat roughly nine in ten homes?
Iceland
Iceland sits on a volcanic rift that is among the most geologically active places on Earth, and it pipes the heat to buildings through district-heating networks.
Scotland
Scotland: Blyth's windmill charged batteries that lit his cottage at Marykirk, and a later design is said to have powered the home for 25 years; that winter Charles Brush built a far larger machine in Ohio.
Q 24The first artificial nuclear reactor went critical in 1942 under a football stadium at the university of which city?
Chicago
Chicago Pile-1, built by Enrico Fermi's team in a rackets court under the stands of Stagg Field, was held to about half a watt on its first run and shut down after a few minutes.
Q 25Hoover Dam impounds Lake Mead on the border between Nevada and which other state?
Arizona
Arizona: built in the Black Canyon of the Colorado between 1931 and 1936, the dam was called Boulder Dam under the Roosevelt administration until Congress restored Hoover's name in 1947.
Q 26Which pigment do plants mainly use to capture light for photosynthesis?
Chlorophyll
Chlorophyll absorbs most colours of sunlight but green least, so green is the light that leaves bounce back to our eyes.
Q 27Which law of thermodynamics says energy can be transformed but neither created nor destroyed?
The first law
The first law is why a machine that puts out more energy than it takes in can never work, and why the US Patent Office refuses perpetual-motion patents without a working model.
Q 28Under the third law of thermodynamics, a system's entropy approaches a constant value as what approaches zero?
Its temperature
Its temperature: absolute zero, −273.15 °C, can be approached but never reached, so even the coldest laboratory experiments stop a tiny fraction of a degree short.
Q 29In the 1880s 'war of the currents', which company's AC system did Edison's DC oppose?
Westinghouse
Westinghouse underbid General Electric to light the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition, and later that year won the contract to build the generators at Niagara Falls.
Q 30Household electricity bills are charged in which unit?
Kilowatt-hours
Kilowatt-hours measure energy, not power: one is a kilowatt used for an hour, so a 100-watt television takes ten hours to use one.