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70 free Trivia for Smart People trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
68 free hard trivia questions with answers. Super hard trivia means one thing here: nobody wins it by guessing. There are no questions about which planet is closest to the Sun. Instead you get the number of teeth on the largest gear of the Antikythera mechanism, the exclusive economic zone the Challenger Deep actually sits in, the only US state with a single-chamber legislature and the war that lasted under three-quarters of an hour. The questions run across science, history, geography, language, economics and literature. Roughly a fifth are merely difficult; the rest are hard to expert, the kind of question where knowing the neighbouring fact is not enough. Wrong answers are plausible on purpose, so a coin-flip between two options will not save you. Every question was written against a primary or encyclopaedic source and carries the sentence it came from, because a hard quiz is worthless if the hard answers are wrong. Use it as a solo gauntlet, a tie-breaker round, or the last ten minutes of a quiz night when the easy teams have gone home.
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Q 01The Antikythera mechanism could predict which astronomical events decades in advance?
Eclipses
The mechanism predicted solar and lunar eclipses on a spiral dial at the back; it also modelled the Moon's irregular orbit, speeding it up at perigee, a motion studied by Hipparchus of Rhodes.
Q 02How many teeth did the largest gear of that ancient Greek device originally carry?
223
That count matches the Saros eclipse cycle of 223 lunar months, which is how the machine could forecast eclipses at all.
Q 03Machinery as complex as the Antikythera mechanism did not reappear until which century in western Europe?
The 14th
Geared machinery of comparable complexity did not reappear in western Europe until the 14th century, with the astronomical clocks of Richard of Wallingford and Giovanni de' Dondi.
Q 04Besides the heavens, what four-year cycle did the Antikythera device track?
Athletic games
A small dial on the back tracked the four-year cycle of the Panhellenic athletic games, naming the Olympic, Isthmian, Pythian and Nemean games in turn.
Q 05Radiocarbon dating placed the vellum of the Voynich manuscript in which period?
The early 15th century
Radiocarbon dating at the University of Arizona in 2009 placed the vellum between 1404 and 1438, the early 15th century; analysis also found no sign of earlier erased writing.
Q 06Which library has held the Voynich manuscript since 1969?
The Beinecke at Yale
The Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale has held it as MS 408 since the dealer Hans P. Kraus donated it in 1969.
Q 07The Voynich manuscript's parchment was made from the skin of which animal?
Calves
The vellum is calfskin, from calves; protein analysis in 2014 indicated at least fourteen or fifteen whole calf hides went into the book.
Q 08The Challenger Deep lies inside the exclusive economic zone of which country?
Federated States of Micronesia
The Challenger Deep sits inside the Federated States of Micronesia's exclusive economic zone, which is why the US Marianas Trench Marine National Monument declared in 2009 stops short of the deepest point.
Q 09Water pressure at the bottom of the Mariana Trench is roughly how many times that at sea level?
1,072
At about 1,086 bar, pressure in the Challenger Deep is roughly 1,072 times atmospheric, close to eight tons on every square inch, yet single-celled monothalamea live there.
Q 10Of NASA's twin outer-planet probes launched in 1977, which lifted off first?
Voyager 2
Voyager 2 launched on 20 August 1977; Voyager 1 left 16 days later on a faster trajectory and overtook it, which is why the numbering looks backwards.
Q 11Voyager 1's close flyby of Titan in 1980 cost it the chance to visit which world?
Pluto
Voyager 1 could have gone on to Pluto, but NASA chose a close pass of Titan, already known to have a thick atmosphere; the flyby flung the probe out of the planetary plane.
Q 12Before being renamed in 1977, Voyager 1 carried which designation?
Mariner 11
Voyager 1 began as Mariner 11 of the Mariner Jupiter-Saturn 1977 project, successor to the cancelled Grand Tour; the Voyager name was adopted months before launch as the design diverged from earlier Mariners.
Q 13The 1944 monetary conference that created the IMF was held in which US state?
New Hampshire
Q 21How old is the world's deepest lake estimated to be?
Twenty-five to thirty million years
It sits in a rift valley where the crust is still pulling apart, which keeps deepening the basin instead of silting it up.
Q 22Why did the 1908 Tunguska explosion leave no crater?
The object exploded in the air
The object exploded in the air, an airburst some 5 to 10 kilometres up, so nothing large reached the ground; the blast nonetheless flattened about 2,150 square kilometres of Siberian taiga.
Q 23The Tunguska blast is estimated at what explosive yield?
Between 3 and 50 megatons
Bretton Woods is in New Hampshire; delegates from 44 Allied nations met at the Mount Washington Hotel from 1 to 22 July 1944 and signed the agreement on the final day.
Q 14Which 1976 agreement formally ratified the end of the Bretton Woods system?
The Jamaica Accords
The Jamaica Accords, agreed in Kingston in January 1976, amended the IMF articles to legitimise floating exchange rates and formally demonetise gold.
Q 15The IBRD, founded alongside the IMF in 1944, became part of which institution?
The World Bank Group
The International Bank for Reconstruction and Development is the original arm of the World Bank Group, which also includes the IDA, IFC, MIGA and ICSID.
Q 16On what date did the United States end the convertibility of its currency into gold?
15 August 1971
On 15 August 1971 President Nixon suspended dollar-gold convertibility, the 'Nixon shock'; the Smithsonian Agreement that December briefly re-pegged currencies before they floated in 1973.
Q 17The Rosetta Stone records a decree issued in 196 BC on behalf of which ruler?
Ptolemy V Epiphanes
The decree honours Ptolemy V Epiphanes, the boy king crowned at Memphis, and was issued by a council of priests in 196 BC on the anniversary of his coronation.
Q 18What kind of rock is the Rosetta Stone actually made of?
Granodiorite
The stone is granodiorite, long misidentified as basalt because white chalk in the inscriptions and a carnauba wax coating had darkened it; cleaning in 1999 revealed the grey, pink-veined rock.
Q 19In which year did Jean-Francois Champollion announce his transliteration of the Egyptian scripts?
1822
Champollion announced his decipherment in the Lettre a M. Dacier, read in Paris on 27 September 1822; the stone itself had been found by French soldiers in July 1799.
Q 20Which body of water holds between 22 and 23 percent of the world's fresh surface water?
Lake Baikal
Lake Baikal in Siberia holds about 23,600 cubic kilometres of fresh water, more than all five North American Great Lakes combined, in a surface area barely larger than Belgium.
Estimates put the Tunguska airburst between 3 and 50 megatons of TNT, hundreds of times the Hiroshima bomb; the object was probably a stony asteroid tens of metres across arriving at about 27 kilometres per second.
Q 24In 1897 a bill implying a false value of pi passed the House of which US state?
Indiana
Indiana's House passed Edwin Goodwin's 1897 bill unanimously; it claimed to square the circle and offered the method royalty-free to the state's schools before the Senate shelved it.
Q 25Who happened to be in the legislature that day and killed the pi bill?
A Purdue mathematics professor
Clarence Waldo, a Purdue University mathematics professor, was at the statehouse on other business, saw the bill, and briefed senators, who postponed it indefinitely.
Q 26Squaring the circle with straightedge and compass had already been proved impossible in 1882 by whom?
Ferdinand von Lindemann
Ferdinand von Lindemann proved in 1882 that pi is transcendental, which rules out squaring the circle with straightedge and compass, settling a question open since antiquity.
Q 27Which institution created and funds the sixth Nobel, the prize in economic sciences?
Sveriges Riksbank
Sveriges Riksbank, Sweden's central bank, endowed the economics prize in 1968 to mark its 300th anniversary; the first award went to Ragnar Frisch and Jan Tinbergen in 1969.
Q 28How many patents did Alfred Nobel hold in his lifetime?
355
Nobel held 355 patents, including dynamite (1867), gelignite and ballistite; he bought the Bofors ironworks in 1894 and turned it into an arms maker.
Q 29Who is the youngest person ever to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, at 41?
Rudyard Kipling
Rudyard Kipling won in 1907 aged 41, the youngest literature laureate, and the first English-language writer to receive the prize.
Q 30Who was the oldest literature laureate, receiving the 2007 prize at 88?
Doris Lessing
Doris Lessing was 88 when she received the 2007 prize, the oldest literature laureate; she had learned of the award from reporters outside her London home on 11 October, eleven days before her birthday.