High School Trivia
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157 free High School trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
These 80 trivia questions for high school students are random high school trivia in the literal sense: a question from every classroom on the timetable, shuffled together. You will meet the Pythagorean theorem and the quadratic discriminant from math, mitochondria and Mendel's peas from biology, pH and noble gases from chemistry, Newton's third law from physics, the Louisiana Purchase and the 13th Amendment from US history, the Bastille and the Berlin Wall from world history, and the books everyone was assigned, from Romeo and Juliet to The Great Gatsby and Lord of the Flies. It works two ways. Students can use it as a quick review before finals, a bell-ringer in class or a fun trivia game for a club meeting. Adults can use it to find out how much of high school actually stuck; the questions start easy and end with a few that most graduates have long since forgotten. Every answer was checked against an encyclopedia entry or primary source before publication, and each one comes with a one-line explanation that adds something you probably did not learn in class. Because every question comes straight from the high school curriculum, it also works as trivia for 15 year olds and up: a freshman or sophomore should recognise most of it, and the hard ones make a fair challenge for older teens.
30 of 157 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Whose theorem says the square of a right triangle's hypotenuse equals the sum of the squares of the other sides?
Pythagoras
Babylonian clay tablets show the relationship was known a thousand years before Pythagoras was born; he just got the naming rights.
Q 02Pi is the ratio of a circle's circumference to what?
Its diameter
Its diameter fits around the circumference about 3.14 times; Archimedes trapped pi between 223/71 and 22/7 using 96-sided polygons drawn inside and outside a circle.
Q 03What do the interior angles of any triangle add up to?
180 degrees
180 degrees holds only on a flat surface: on a globe, a triangle drawn from the North Pole down to the equator can have a right angle at every corner.
Q 04What is the only even prime number?
2
2 is the only even prime because every other even number can be divided by 2, which gives it a factor besides 1 and itself.
Q 05In the quadratic formula, the expression b² − 4ac is called what?
The discriminant
The discriminant b² − 4ac tells how many real roots a quadratic has: negative means none, zero means one repeated root, positive means two.
Q 06The imaginary unit i is defined by which equation?
i² = −1
i² = −1 is the whole definition of the imaginary unit; electrical engineers write it as j instead, because the letter i already stands for electric current.
Q 07What is the highest possible score on the SAT?
1600
1600 is two sections of up to 800 points each; from 2005 to early 2016 a third section, writing, pushed the maximum to 2400.
Q 08Which organelle is nicknamed the 'powerhouse of the cell'?
The mitochondrion
The mitochondrion carries its own small loop of DNA, normally inherited only from the mother, a leftover from the free-living bacterium it descends from.
Q 09Adenine, cytosine and guanine are three of DNA's four bases; what is the fourth?
Thymine
Thymine takes its name from the thymus: Albrecht Kossel and Albert Neumann first isolated it in 1893 from the thymus glands of calves.
Q 10What shape do the two strands of DNA form?
A double helix
DNA's two strands twist into a double helix, the structure Watson and Crick published in 1953 using X-ray diffraction images from Rosalind Franklin's lab.
Q 11Gregor Mendel worked out the basic laws of heredity by breeding which plants?
Peas
Peas let Mendel follow traits such as seed shape through thousands of plants in his monastery garden from 1856; his findings were ignored until other botanists rediscovered them in 1900.
Q 12Which type of cell division produces sperm and egg cells?
Meiosis
Meiosis halves the chromosome number and swaps stretches of DNA between paired chromosomes as it goes, which is why brothers and sisters inherit different mixes of their parents' genes.
Q 13Which pigment do plants use to absorb light for photosynthesis?
Chlorophyll
Chlorophyll absorbs red and blue light to power photosynthesis and reflects green, which is why leaves look green.
Q 21A rocket moves forward by throwing exhaust backward, an example of which of Newton's laws?
Third law of motion
Third law of motion: the exhaust pushes back on the rocket as hard as the rocket pushes it out, so a rocket needs no air to push against, as Robert Goddard showed in a vacuum chamber.
Q 22Roughly how fast does light travel in a vacuum?
300,000 km per second
Light travels about 300,000 km per second in a vacuum, exactly 299,792,458 metres per second; since 1983 that value has defined the metre.
Q 23The Ring of Fire, home to about 90 percent of the world's earthquakes, surrounds which ocean?
Pacific
Q 14People with which blood type are called universal donors for red blood cell transfusions?
O negative
O negative red cells carry no A, B or RhD antigens, so they can be given to patients of any blood type; AB positive is the universal recipient.
Q 15Which element has atomic number 1?
Hydrogen
Hydrogen is the lightest element and makes up about 75 percent of the universe's normal matter by mass; stars such as the Sun shine by fusing it into helium.
Q 16On the pH scale, what value is neutral?
7
Below 7 is acidic and above 7 is basic; each step is a tenfold change, so pH 5 is a hundred times more acidic than pH 7.
Q 17Helium, neon, argon and krypton belong to which group of elements?
Noble gases
Helium, neon, argon and krypton are noble gases, group 18 of the periodic table; their full outer electron shells make them almost completely unreactive.
Q 18Who published the first widely accepted periodic table in 1869?
Dmitri Mendeleev
Dmitri Mendeleev's 1869 table left gaps for undiscovered elements and predicted their properties; gallium (1875) and germanium (1886) later filled two of them.
Q 19How many chemical elements are on the modern periodic table?
118
118 elements fill the modern table, and the heaviest two dozen were first made artificially rather than found in nature.
Q 20The constant 6.022 × 10^23, a fixture of chemistry class, is named after which Italian scientist?
Amedeo Avogadro
Amedeo Avogadro never knew the number: he proposed in 1811 that equal volumes of gas hold equal numbers of molecules, and Jean Perrin named the constant for him in 1909.
The Ring of Fire is a horseshoe of deep trenches and volcanic arcs rimming the Pacific Ocean, where oceanic plates sink beneath their neighbours.
Q 24Which language has the most native speakers in the world?
Mandarin
Mandarin has roughly twice as many native speakers as Spanish, the runner-up; English, third on that list, comes out on top only when second-language speakers are counted.
Q 25Who accepted Robert E. Lee's surrender at Appomattox?
Ulysses S. Grant
Ulysses S. Grant let Lee's soldiers keep their horses and mules for the spring planting and sent rations across the lines to the hungry Confederates.
Q 26Which amendment to the US Constitution abolished slavery?
The 13th
The 13th Amendment took effect in December 1865 when Georgia ratified it; Mississippi held out until 1995 and did not file the paperwork until 2013.
Q 27How many amendments make up the Bill of Rights?
10
The Bill of Rights is the first 10 amendments, ratified in 1791. Twelve were sent to the states in 1789; the one on lawmakers' pay was finally ratified in 1992 as the 27th.
Q 28The United States bought the Louisiana Territory in 1803 from which country?
France
France sold the territory for about 15 million dollars, nearly doubling the United States, after a slave revolt in Haiti wrecked its plans for an American empire.
Q 29What does 'score' mean in Lincoln's 'four score and seven years ago'?
Twenty
Twenty years make a score, so four score and seven is 87: speaking in 1863, Lincoln was counting back to 1776.
Q 30In which city did the Constitutional Convention meet in 1787?
Philadelphia
Philadelphia's Pennsylvania State House, now Independence Hall, hosted the convention under a rule of secrecy: no reporters or visitors were admitted, so delegates could argue freely.