Getting your questions ready
Getting your questions ready
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47 free Fill in the Blank trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
Fill in the blank trivia flips the usual format: instead of asking a question, each item gives you a sentence with one word or number missing, and your job is to complete it. This set has 50 of them, each with four possible answers, spread evenly across geography, history, science, sports, movies and TV, music, literature, food, animals and technology. The blanks range from warm-ups most people know (Dorothy's dog, the powerhouse of the cell) to ones that catch out confident players (the year Nintendo was founded, the king Bluetooth is named after). It works well read aloud for a pub quiz round, a classroom starter or a car game, because the sentence structure makes every question quick to say and quick to answer. Every answer is checked against a cited source before it goes live, and each one comes with a short explanation that adds a detail you probably did not know. Play online to get your score, or use the list to run your own round.
30 of 47 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Fill in the blank: The capital of Australia is ____.
Canberra
Canberra was purpose-built as a compromise capital and formally named in 1913, after Sydney and Melbourne both wanted the job.
Q 02Fill in the blank: The River Danube empties into the ____.
Black Sea
On the way it passes through four capital cities: Vienna, Bratislava, Budapest and Belgrade.
Q 03Fill in the blank: Mount Kilimanjaro, Africa's highest peak, is in the country of ____.
Tanzania
The summit was renamed Uhuru Peak, Swahili for Freedom Peak, after the country formed in 1964.
Q 04Fill in the blank: The smallest sovereign state in the world by area is ____.
Vatican City
It covers just 44 hectares and had a population of about 882 in 2024, the smallest by people as well as land.
Q 05Fill in the blank: The Strait of Gibraltar separates Spain from ____.
Morocco
One of its Arabic names, Bab al-maghrib, means Gate of the West.
Q 06Fill in the blank: Magna Carta was sealed in 1215 by King ____ of England.
John
It was sealed at Runnymede, near Windsor, on 15 June 1215.
Q 07Which year fills the blank: 'The Berlin Wall fell on 9 November ____, during the Peaceful Revolution'?
1989
1989's 9 November is remembered as the night the Wall came down, after East Berlin transit rules were overwhelmed and discarded.
Q 08Fill in the blank: The Great Fire of London broke out in the year ____.
1666
It burned from Sunday 2 September to Wednesday 5 September and gutted the medieval City inside the old Roman wall.
Q 09Fill in the blank: The Treaty of Versailles was signed on 28 June ____.
1919
The Allied blockade of Germany was kept in place for eight months after the Armistice, right into the year the treaty was signed.
Q 10Fill in the blank: The ancient city of Carthage stood in what is now ____.
Tunisia
Ships crossing the Mediterranean had to pass between Sicily and the Carthaginian coast, which gave the city enormous leverage.
Q 11Fill in the blank: The chemical symbol for gold is ____.
Au
The symbol comes from the Latin aurum; Ag, the obvious rival, belongs to silver.
Q 12Fill in the blank: On the Mohs scale, the hardest natural material is ____.
diamond
Diamond packs more atoms into a given volume than any other known substance, which is why it is also the least compressible.
Q 13Fill in the blank: The organelle nicknamed the powerhouse of the cell is the ____.
mitochondrion
The nickname was popularised by Philip Siekevitz in a 1957 Scientific American article of the same name.
Fill in the blank: The bones of the middle ear are the malleus, the incus and the ____.
Q 21Which name fills the blank: 'The 1997 epic historical romance Titanic was written and directed by ____'?
James Cameron
James Cameron went on to make Avatar, and the two films spent years trading the title of highest-grossing film ever.
Q 22Fill in the blank: In The Wizard of Oz, Dorothy's dog is named ____.
Toto
In the book it is Toto who pulls back the curtain to expose the Wizard as a fake.
Q 23Fill in the blank: Black Panther rules the fictional African nation of ____.
Wakanda
Wakanda first appeared in Marvel comics decades before the 2018 film made it a household name.
stapes
In Latin the trio are the hammer, anvil and stirrup, and they are the smallest bones in the human body.
Q 15Fill in the blank: The SI unit of electric current is the ____.
ampere
It was originally defined as one tenth of the current unit in the old centimetre-gram-second system.
Q 16Fill in the blank: The 2016 Summer Olympics were held in ____.
Rio de Janeiro
Rio de Janeiro's Games ran from 5 to 21 August 2016, though some preliminary events started on 3 August.
Q 17Fill in the blank: In tennis, a score of zero is called ____.
love
The word probably comes from the phrase playing for love, meaning playing for nothing.
Q 18Fill in the blank: A marathon covers ____ kilometres.
42.195
That works out to roughly 26.2 miles, and it can be run on trails as well as roads.
Q 19Which league fills the blank: 'The Stanley Cup is awarded each year to the playoff champion of the ____'?
NHL
NHL's Stanley Cup is the oldest existing trophy awarded to a professional sports franchise in North America.
Q 20Which colour fills the blank: 'Since 1919, the overall leader of the Tour de France has worn a ____ jersey'?
yellow
Yellow, the maillot jaune, replaced the green armband worn by the winners of the first several Tours instead of a jersey.
Q 24Fill in the blank: The Godfather was adapted from a 1969 novel by ____.
Mario Puzo
Puzo co-wrote the screenplay with director Francis Ford Coppola.
Q 25Fill in the blank: The Simpsons live in the town of ____.
Springfield
The show has never definitively said which state its Springfield is in, and the writers treat that as a running joke.
Q 26Fill in the blank: The Beatles formed in 1960 in the English city of ____.
Liverpool
They honed their act playing clubs in Liverpool and Hamburg before fame arrived.
Q 27Which word fills the blank: 'The choral finale of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony is known as the Ode to ____'?
Joy
Joy's words come from a poem Friedrich Schiller wrote in 1785, with a few extra lines added by Beethoven himself.
Q 28Fill in the blank: A modern piano has ____ keys.
88
88 is standard; Bösendorfer and Stuart & Sons are the rare makers who build pianos with extra keys.
Q 29Fill in the blank: Bob Marley was born in Nine Mile on the island of ____.
Jamaica
He formed the group that became the Wailers with Peter Tosh and Bunny Wailer in 1963.
Q 30Fill in the blank: The dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four was written by ____.
George Orwell
Published in June 1949, it was Orwell's ninth and final completed book.