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60 free Gobi Desert trivia questions with answers — geography quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
The Gobi is not the desert most people picture. It is cold, high and mostly bare rock, spread across southern Mongolia and northern China, where winter can hit -40 °C and the temperature can swing 35 degrees in a day. This quiz opens with that geography and climate (how big, how dry, why it is cold, what its name means) and then digs into the fossil beds that made it famous: the first dinosaur eggs ever found, Roy Chapman Andrews's car-borne expeditions, the turkey-sized real Velociraptor, the Fighting Dinosaurs, Tarbosaurus and the mysterious arms of Deinocheirus. From there it covers the living Gobi: the last few dozen Gobi bears, wild camels that drink water saltier than the sea, the reintroduced takhi, the Singing Sands, the ice gorge of Yolyn Am, the death worm legend, giant copper and coal mines, the railway that changes gauge at the Chinese border and the sandstorms that turn Beijing's sky yellow. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's articles on the Gobi and its wildlife, fossils and landmarks, and each question shows the sentence that supports it. Try our Sahara, Mongolia and dinosaurs quizzes next.
30 of 60 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01The Gobi spans southern Mongolia and the north of which other country?
China
It is a cold desert and grassland region, and the sixth-largest desert in the world.
Q 02By area, where does the Gobi rank among the world's deserts?
Sixth
Antarctica, the Arctic, the Sahara, the Arabian and the Australian deserts are all bigger.
Q 03The desert's name comes from a Mongolian word meaning what?
Dryland
The Chinese cognate gebi refers to rocky semi-deserts rather than sandy ones.
Q 04How long is the Gobi from south-west to north-east?
1,600 km
It is about 800 km from north to south and widest in the west, near Lake Bosten and Lop Nor.
Q 05Roughly what area does the Gobi cover?
1.3 million km²
That is about half a million square miles, or roughly the size of Peru.
Q 06Rather than sand, most of the Gobi's surface resembles what?
Exposed bare rock
Only pockets such as Khongoryn Els in the far south are classic dune fields.
Q 07Winter temperatures in the Gobi can plunge to about what?
-40 °C
Summer can reach 45 °C, and frost and snow sometimes settle on the dunes.
Q 08Besides its northerly latitude, what feature makes the Gobi a cold desert?
It sits on a high plateau
The plateau lies roughly 910 to 1,520 metres above sea level.
Q 09About how much rain falls in the Gobi each year on average?
194 mm
Most of it falls in summer; extra moisture arrives in winter as wind-blown snow.
Q 10Some of the Gobi's winter moisture arrives as snow blown by wind from where?
The Siberian steppes
The same winds drive the winter cold that makes this a cold desert.
Q 11Gobi temperatures can swing by as much as how many degrees Celsius within 24 hours?
35
Average winter minimums are about -21 °C and summer maximums about 27 °C.
Q 12The Gobi yielded the world's first known dinosaur eggs; in which year were they uncovered?
1923
Twenty-six eggs averaging 23 centimetres long were found that year.
Q 13Which American explorer led the 1920s Central Asiatic Expeditions into the Gobi and reputedly inspired Indiana Jones?
Roy Chapman Andrews
He later became director of the American Museum of Natural History.
How did Andrews first get a job at the American Museum of Natural History?
Q 21The Fighting Dinosaurs fossil shows a Velociraptor locked in combat with which dinosaur?
Protoceratops
One theory is that a collapsing dune buried both animals mid-fight.
Q 22Mongolia's Fighting Dinosaurs were found in 1971 by an expedition partnered with which country?
Poland
The joint expeditions ran from 1963 to 1971 and also turned up the arms of Deinocheirus.
Q 23Tarbosaurus, apex predator of the Gobi's Nemegt Formation, is closest kin to which famous dinosaur?
Tyrannosaurus
Some experts think it is simply an Asian Tyrannosaurus; its name means 'alarming lizard'.
As a janitor
Told there were no openings at his level, he swept floors in the taxidermy department and collected specimens on the side.
Q 15Andrews's 1920s expeditions crossed the Gobi in a fleet of cars from which manufacturer?
Dodge
The motorcade drove west from Peking, supported by camel caravans carrying fuel.
Q 16In 1922 Andrews's party found a fossil of Paraceratherium, a gigantic hornless relative of which animal?
Rhinoceros
It was then called Baluchitherium and was among the largest land mammals ever.
Q 17The famous 1923 Gobi eggs were shown in 1995 to belong to which dinosaur, whose name means 'egg thief'?
Oviraptor
The 'thief' found beside the nest turned out to be a parent brooding its own eggs.
Q 18The Flaming Cliffs are known in Mongolian as Bayanzag, meaning rich in what?
Saxaul
The shrub is the main firewood of steppe nomads; the cliffs are also famous for the first dinosaur eggs.
Q 19The real Velociraptor, first found in the Gobi in 1923, was roughly the size of which animal?
A turkey
The film versions were modelled on the much larger Deinonychus.
Q 20Quill knobs on a Velociraptor forearm bone are direct evidence that it had what?
Feathers
The specimen was about 1.5 metres long and weighed around 15 kilograms.
Q 24Which country joined the Mongolian expedition that dug up the first Tarbosaurus skull in 1946?
Soviet Union
Evgeny Maleev named it Tyrannosaurus bataar in 1955.
Q 25Deinocheirus, long known only from a pair of 2.4-metre arms, has a name meaning what?
Horrible hand
Complete specimens described in 2014 revealed a hump-backed, duck-billed giant 11 metres long.
Q 26The Nemegt Basin in the Gobi is noted for fossils and prehistoric stone tools roughly how old?
100,000 years
The basin's river sediments also hold early mammals and dinosaur eggs.
Q 27According to the Gobi Bear Project, how many Gobi bears remain in the wild?
Fewer than 40
Known as mazaalai, they are the only bears adapted to a hot desert, and none live in captivity.
Q 28What makes up the bulk of the Gobi bear's diet?
Roots, berries and plants
Only about 8% of its diet is animal protein, and there is no evidence it hunts large mammals.
Q 29The Gobi's wild camels can survive on drinking water that is what?
Saltier than seawater
Probably no other large mammal, not even the domestic Bactrian camel, can tolerate it.
Q 30China began testing nuclear weapons in 1964 at Lop Nur, a site that is home to which endangered animal?
Wild Bactrian camel
The camels showed no apparent ill effects from the radiation and kept breeding.