5th and 6th Grade Trivia
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166 free 5th and 6th Grade trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
67 free 5th grade trivia questions with answers, plus trivia questions for sixth graders and tweens, built around what 10- to 12-year-olds are actually studying. The questions cover world geography (the biggest ocean, the longest river, why Antarctica counts as a desert, the largest country), science (photosynthesis, the powerhouse of the cell, tectonic plates, the planets, the four states of matter, what is in the air), math (primes, pi, right angles, fractions, perimeter, PEMDAS), and US history from the Boston Tea Party and the Bill of Rights to the Louisiana Purchase, Lincoln, Hawaii's statehood and Dr. King. There is a grammar and figurative-language round (verbs, adjectives, similes, alliteration, onomatopoeia, haiku), a bit of ancient history, a famous-scientists round (Einstein, Marie Curie, Amelia Earhart), and a books round on Percy Jackson, Wonder, Harry Potter, Holes, Hatchet, Number the Stars, Romeo and Juliet and Diary of a Wimpy Kid. It works for a classroom warm-up, a family game night, trivia for tweens at a sleepover, or an are-you-smarter-than-a-5th-grader challenge where the grown-ups find out how much they have forgotten. Every answer has been checked against a reference source, shown under each question once you answer, so teachers can trust it.
30 of 166 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which is the largest and deepest of Earth's oceans?
Pacific
The Pacific is so big that every continent could fit inside it with room to spare, and its Mariana Trench is deep enough to drown Mount Everest with about 2 km of water above the peak.
Q 02Which river carries more water than any other on Earth?
The Amazon
The Amazon carries about a fifth of all the river water reaching the world's oceans, so much that it dilutes the sea's saltiness more than 160 km from shore.
Q 03The Nile River flows north and empties into which sea?
The Mediterranean
The Mediterranean takes the Nile through its delta north of Cairo; since the river runs from south to north, the upland south is called Upper Egypt and the delta Lower Egypt.
Q 04The Sahara is the largest hot desert, but which two deserts are bigger overall?
Antarctica and the Arctic
Antarctica and the Arctic are polar deserts: a desert is defined by scant precipitation, not heat, and at roughly 14 million square km each they outsize the 9 million square km Sahara.
Q 05Mount Everest's summit sits on China's border with which other country?
Nepal
Nepal and China long gave different heights for the peak because Nepal counted the snow cap and China only the rock beneath, until a joint survey in 2020 settled on one figure.
Q 06Which of these numbers is a prime number?
23
23 is prime; 21 is 3 x 7, 25 is 5 x 5 and 27 is 3 x 9. Every whole number greater than 1 is either prime or a product of primes.
Q 07A right angle measures exactly how many degrees?
90
A right angle is 90 degrees, the corner of a square; the 'right' translates the Latin rectus, meaning upright, like a line standing straight up from its base.
Q 08Pi, about 3.14159, is what you get when you divide a circle's circumference by what?
Its diameter
Its diameter is the divisor, so every circle is a little over three diameters around; pi's decimals never end or repeat, and Pi Day, March 14, is also Einstein's birthday.
Q 09In the fraction 3/4, what is the number 4 called?
The denominator
The denominator, from the Latin for 'that which names', names the size of the parts, here fourths, while the numerator on top counts how many of them there are.
Q 10What do we call the total distance around the outside of a shape?
Perimeter
Perimeter comes from the Greek for 'around' and 'measure'; on a circle the same distance gets a name of its own, the circumference.
Q 11Plants make their own food using sunlight, water and which gas from the air?
Carbon dioxide
Carbon dioxide enters through pores in the leaves, and photosynthesis uses light energy to combine it with water into glucose, the sugar the plant lives on.
Q 12Which part of a cell is nicknamed the 'powerhouse' because it turns food into a fuel molecule called ATP?
The mitochondrion
The mitochondrion carries its own DNA, passed down almost entirely from your mother, because it began as a free-living bacterium that another cell engulfed more than a billion years ago.
Q 13Who first saw cells in a thin slice of cork in 1665 and gave them their name?
Robert Hooke
Q 21What are the large moving pieces of Earth's rigid outer shell called?
Tectonic plates
Tectonic plates creep only a few centimetres a year, about as fast as fingernails grow, yet over some 200 million years that drift broke the supercontinent Pangaea into today's continents.
Q 22Where are most of Earth's volcanoes actually found?
Underwater
Most volcanoes are underwater, strung along the mid-ocean ridge, a 65,000 km chain of undersea mountains where molten rock wells up as the sea floor spreads apart.
Q 23Which organ of the digestive tract absorbs most of the nutrients from food?
The small intestine
Robert Hooke described the tiny boxes in cork in his 1665 book Micrographia, likened them to a honeycomb and called them cells, from the Latin for a small room.
Q 14How many bones does an adult human have once childhood bones have fused?
206
206 in an adult: a baby is born with about 270 to 300 softer bones and pieces of cartilage, and many of them fuse together as the skeleton grows.
Q 15Which of these is one of the six classical simple machines?
The pulley
The pulley joins the lever, wheel and axle, inclined plane, wedge and screw; one pulley only redirects your pull, but several rigged together let you lift a load with a fraction of the force.
Q 16The fixed point that a lever pivots on is called what?
The fulcrum
The fulcrum is the pivot point a lever turns on; Archimedes supposedly said that with a long enough lever and a place to stand he could move the world.
Q 17Which is the smallest planet in the Solar System and the closest to the Sun?
Mercury
Mercury is the smallest planet and the nearest to the Sun; its solar day, sunrise to sunrise, lasts about 176 Earth days, twice as long as its 88-day year.
Q 18Jupiter's Great Red Spot is what kind of feature?
A giant storm
A giant storm, the Great Red Spot is a hurricane in reverse: it whirls around a centre of high pressure, where the great storms on Earth form around low pressure.
Q 19Which planet was found by mathematics before anyone saw it, from its tug on Uranus's orbit?
Neptune
It is the eighth and farthest planet and cannot be seen without a telescope.
Q 20Which four planets are the rocky 'terrestrial' planets of the inner Solar System?
Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars
Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars formed close to the young Sun, where it was too hot for ice and gas to gather, so only rock and metal could clump together into planets.
The small intestine does more than 90% of the absorbing because tiny finger-like villi line its walls, hugely multiplying the surface that food passes over.
Q 24The Declaration of Independence was adopted by the Second Continental Congress on which date?
July 4, 1776
Congress adopted the Declaration on July 4, 1776, two days after voting for independence on July 2, the date John Adams expected Americans to celebrate.
Q 25Who wrote the original draft of the Declaration of Independence?
Thomas Jefferson
Thomas Jefferson wrote the draft in June 1776 for a committee of five that included John Adams and Benjamin Franklin; Congress then edited and shortened his text before adopting it.
Q 26Colonists dumped more than 300 chests of tea into which city's harbour in December 1773?
Boston
Boston became the flashpoint because its governor refused to let the tea ships sail home still loaded, as ships sent to other ports did; the raiders emptied every chest in about three hours.
Q 27Which 1783 agreement ended the American Revolutionary War with Britain recognising US independence?
Treaty of Paris
The Treaty of Paris, signed on 3 September 1783, ended the war; the last major battle had been at Yorktown in 1781, where the French fleet blocked Cornwallis's escape.
Q 28The US Constitution was written at a convention held in 1787 in which city?
Philadelphia
Philadelphia's Independence Hall, where the Declaration had been signed, hosted the delegates, who agreed to keep every debate secret so that each could speak and change his mind freely.
Q 29The Bill of Rights, covering free speech, guns, trials and more, is the name for which amendments to the US Constitution?
The first ten
The first ten amendments were ratified together in 1791; James Madison drafted them to answer Anti-Federalists who worried the new government had too much power.
Q 30In 1803 the United States bought the huge Louisiana Territory from which country?
France
France sold it because Napoleon, facing a new war with Britain and having lost an army to revolt and yellow fever in Haiti, gave up on an American empire and let it go for $15 million.