Getting your questions ready
Getting your questions ready
Beat the crowd
10 questions No timer
50 free Granite trivia questions with answers — nature quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
This granite trivia quiz is about the most famous rock on Earth: the coarse-grained igneous stone that makes up the deep basement of every continent and rises to the surface as domes, tors and sheer big walls. The first part covers the geology, from the minerals in the mix (quartz, feldspar and mica), the Latin word behind the name and the way granite cools slowly underground in plutons and batholiths, to weathering, radon, the difference between granite and rhyolite, and why 'black granite' usually is not granite at all. The second part travels to the landmarks and industries built on it: Mount Rushmore, Half Dome and El Capitan, Stone Mountain, Sugarloaf, Pikes Peak, the Cairngorms and Aberdeen's Granite City; Egypt's Aswan quarries and Cleopatra's Needle, the world's first all-granite temple in India, Barre and Quincy in New England, America's first railroad and the Scottish island that supplies most of the world's curling stones. Easy questions suit students and casual players; the hard ones will test geologists and stonemasons. Every answer is checked against Wikipedia's articles on granite and each landmark, and every explanation adds one extra fact. Play, share your score and see who really knows their rocks.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which of these is the main type of rock that granite belongs to?
Intrusive igneous
It crystallises slowly from silica-rich magma underground, which is why its individual grains are large enough to see.
Q 02The word "granite" comes from the Latin granum, meaning what?
A grain
The name refers to the coarse, completely crystalline texture that you can see with the naked eye.
Q 03Which of these minerals is NOT one of granite's main ingredients?
Calcite
Calcite is the stuff of limestone and marble; granite is built from quartz, feldspars and mica or amphibole.
Q 04By modern convention, true granite contains what proportion of quartz by volume?
20% to 60%
Rocks with more than 60% quartz are simply called quartz-rich granitoids, and those with almost nothing else are quartzolite.
Q 05What is the extrusive (volcanic) equivalent of granite?
Rhyolite
Same chemistry, but erupted and cooled fast at the surface, so the crystals stay tiny.
Q 06A granite with some crystals much larger than the groundmass has what texture?
Porphyritic
The big crystals are called phenocrysts and are usually alkali feldspar.
Q 07What is the approximate density of granite?
About 2.65 to 2.75 g/cm3
That is roughly two and three-quarter times the density of water; its compressive strength usually exceeds 200 megapascals.
Q 08Roughly what is the melting temperature of dry granite at ambient pressure?
1215–1260 °C
Add water at a few hundred megapascals of pressure and the melting point drops to about 650 °C.
Q 09A large mass of plutonic rock exposed over more than 100 square kilometres is called what?
A batholith
The word comes from Greek for deep stone, and batholiths are built from many individual plutons.
Q 10When feldspar in granite is chemically weathered by carbonic acid, which clay mineral does it turn into?
Kaolinite
The loose end product of fully weathered granite is called grus.
Q 11Which radioactive gas, formed by the decay of uranium in granite, can collect in basements built over it?
Radon
It is the second leading cause of lung cancer in the United States after smoking.
Q 12The stone sold as "black granite" is usually which rock?
Gabbro
Gabbro has a completely different chemistry, but the construction trade uses 'granite' loosely for many intrusive rocks.
Q 13Which relief-carved granite obelisk deteriorated badly within 200 years of moving to damp, polluted London?
Cleopatra's Needle
Its twin stands in New York's Central Park, where it has suffered similar weathering.
Q 21Which Vermont city calls itself the "Granite Center of the World"?
Barre
Its Barre Gray stone is prized for outdoor sculpture, and Italian immigrant carvers brought an anarchist labour movement to town.
Q 22The world's largest "deep hole" granite quarry, the E. L. Smith Quarry, is run by which Vermont company?
Rock of Ages
Founded in 1885 in Graniteville, the firm now cuts Devonian Barre granite with diamond wire saws and water jets.
Q 23Which sculptor carved the four presidents into the granite of Mount Rushmore?
Gutzon Borglum
He called it the Shrine of Democracy and worked from 1927 until his death in 1941, when his son Lincoln took over.
Q 14The sarcophagus inside the Great Pyramid of Giza was carved from red granite quarried where?
Aswan
Aswan granite travelled hundreds of kilometres down the Nile to Giza around 2580 BC.
Q 15The world's first temple built entirely of granite was completed in 1010 AD in which country?
India
Rajaraja Chola I's Brihadeeswarar Temple at Tanjore carries a single 80-tonne granite block atop its tower.
Q 16Which Scottish city, built largely from local grey stone, is nicknamed "The Granite City"?
Aberdeen
Its granite sparkles like silver because of high mica content, and Rubislaw quarry supplied it for more than 300 years.
Q 17Aberdeen's Marischal College is the world's second-largest granite building after which one?
El Escorial near Madrid
King Edward VII opened the Broad Street extension, designed by Alexander Marshall Mackenzie.
Q 18Which Scottish inventor's steam-powered cutting tools launched the polished granite tombstone trade in the 1830s?
Alexander MacDonald
His first polished Aberdeen granite headstone at Kensal Green Cemetery in 1832 caused a sensation in London.
Q 19Curling stones are traditionally made from granite quarried on which Scottish island?
Ailsa Craig
The island is now a bird reserve, yet 60 to 70 percent of the world's curling stones still come from its rare granite.
Q 20America's first railroad, the 1826 Granite Railway, hauled Quincy stone to build which Charlestown landmark?
Bunker Hill Monument
Solomon Willard chose the Quincy quarry after searching all New England, and Gridley Bryant designed the line.
Q 24How tall is each presidential head carved into Mount Rushmore?
60 feet
Each figure was meant to be shown to the waist, but funding ran out in 1941 and only Washington has any detail below the chin.
Q 25What did the Lakota name for Mount Rushmore, Tȟuŋkášila Šákpe Pahá, mean?
Six Grandfathers Mountain
The six head-like knobs on the ridge were linked to Black Elk's 1873 vision; earlier the peak was called Cougar Mountain.
Q 26South Dakota historian Doane Robinson originally wanted Mount Rushmore to depict which figures?
Heroes of the American West
His list included Lewis and Clark, Sacagawea, Red Cloud, Buffalo Bill and Crazy Horse before Borglum insisted on presidents.
Q 27How many Confederate figures appear in the giant relief finished on Stone Mountain in 1972?
Three
Jefferson Davis, Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson ride their horses Blackjack, Traveller and Little Sorrel.
Q 28Roughly how far does Stone Mountain's rock body continue underground at its longest?
About 9 miles
The dome rises 825 feet above its surroundings and stretches into neighbouring Gwinnett County.
Q 29Half Dome in Yosemite is technically made of which granitic rock?
Quartz monzonite
It is the exposed remains of a magma chamber that crystallised thousands of feet underground before erosion cut it in half.
Q 30Who made the first ascent of Half Dome in 1875, drilling iron eye bolts into the smooth rock?
George Anderson
He had first tried smearing pine pitch on his feet for grip; today hikers use a pair of steel cables on the same face.