Getting your questions ready
Getting your questions ready
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60 free Impossible trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
These impossible trivia questions are for the person who wins every pub quiz and is bored of it. Nothing here is guessable from general knowledge: you need to know that Palau's capital has no permanent residents, that a barn is a unit of area, that four elements are named after one Swedish village, and which pope reigned for twelve days. The 60 questions are spread across geography, science, history, literature, music, film, sport, food, art, space and technology, so no single specialist can run the table. Difficulty sits at the top of our scale, from very hard to almost nobody-gets-this. Use it as the tiebreaker round, the final-jeopardy substitute, or a way to humble a friend who thinks they know everything. Impossible does not mean unfair. Every answer was checked against a reference page and cited before publication, so each question has exactly one defensible answer.
30 of 60 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which country moved its seat of government to Ngerulmud, a capital with no permanent population, in 2006?
Palau
Its name comes from a Palauan phrase meaning 'place of fermented angelfish'.
Q 02Nukuʻalofa is the capital of which Pacific kingdom?
Tonga
The 1875 constitution formally made it the capital.
Q 03Point Nemo, the spot in the ocean farthest from any land, lies in which ocean?
South Pacific
It sits inside the South Pacific Gyre, and its antipode is in western Kazakhstan.
Q 04Which is the only named sea with no land boundaries at all?
Sargasso Sea
Its edges are defined by ocean currents rather than coastlines, and it covers roughly 4 million square kilometres.
Q 05Which South Atlantic island is considered the remotest inhabited place in the world?
Tristan da Cunha
Its football team can barely play anyone, since travelling abroad from the island is virtually impossible.
Q 06Which African lake is the continent's deepest and holds about 16% of the world's available fresh water?
Tanganyika
Worldwide it is second in both depth and volume only to Lake Baikal.
Q 07Which country, with around 840 known languages, is the most linguistically diverse on Earth?
Papua New Guinea
English and Tok Pisin serve as common languages across the hundreds of small groups.
Q 08Yttrium, terbium, erbium and ytterbium are all named after a village in which country?
Sweden
Ytterby's mine is the richest source of elemental discoveries in the world; holmium, scandium, thulium, tantalum and gadolinium were also first found there.
Q 09In nuclear physics, what is a 'barn'?
A unit of area
One barn is roughly the cross-sectional area of a uranium nucleus; the name was a joke about a target 'as big as a barn'.
Q 10Who is the only person to have won the Nobel Prize in Physics twice?
John Bardeen
The first was for the transistor in 1956 and the second for the BCS theory of superconductivity in 1972.
Q 11Ming, an ocean quahog clam dredged off Iceland, was eventually found to be how old?
507 years
Researchers first said 405 years in 2007, then revised it upwards in 2013, though the clam had already been killed to count its growth bands.
Q 12What is the approximate half-life of carbon-14?
5,700 years
It decays into nitrogen-14 by beta decay, which is why radiocarbon dating stops working beyond about 50,000 years.
Q 13Absolute zero on the Fahrenheit scale is what temperature?
−459.67 °F
The Rankine scale uses Fahrenheit-sized degrees but starts at absolute zero, so 0 °R equals −459.67 °F.
Q 21Which work holds the Guinness World Record for the longest novel?
In Search of Lost Time
Marcel Proust's seven-volume work runs to well over a million words.
Q 22Which author published early sketches under the pen name 'Boz'?
Charles Dickens
The nickname came from 'Moses', a family joke that became 'Boses' when said with a head cold.
Q 23Who was the first Nobel laureate to voluntarily decline the prize, in 1964?
Jean-Paul Sartre
He argued that a writer should not allow himself to be turned into an institution.
Q 14Which land mammal has the most teeth, at around 80 to 100?
Giant armadillo
Its teeth are all alike, grow constantly through life and have no enamel.
Q 15A giraffe's heart must generate roughly how much blood pressure compared with a human's?
About double
That heart weighs around 11 kg and is 60 cm long.
Q 16Who became the world's first female prime minister in 1960?
Sirimavo Bandaranaike
She led Ceylon, later Sri Lanka, and her daughter later became the country's first female president.
Q 17Pope Urban VII holds the record for the shortest recognised papacy. How long did he reign in 1590?
12 days
He died of malaria before he could even be crowned.
Q 18Which future US state existed as an unrecognised independent republic from 1777 to 1791?
Vermont
It briefly called itself the Republic of New Connecticut and minted its own copper coins.
Q 19Which country was known as the Republic of Upper Volta until 1984?
Burkina Faso
President Thomas Sankara renamed it on 4 August 1984.
Q 20Who wrote The Tale of Genji, often called the world's first novel, in the early 11th century?
Murasaki Shikibu
Legend says she was inspired to begin it while gazing at the moon from a temple on Lake Biwa.
Q 24Bloomsday celebrates the events of Ulysses, which all take place on which date in 1904?
16 June
The day is named after Leopold Bloom, the novel's protagonist.
Q 25A modern concert harp typically has how many strings?
47
That gives seven strings per octave across six and a half octaves.
Q 26John Cage's 4′33″, in which the performer plays nothing, is divided into how many movements?
Three
Cage later said the durations of the movements could be decided by the musician.
Q 27Beethoven's 'Eroica' is which of his numbered symphonies?
No. 3
He originally intended to dedicate it to Napoleon.
Q 28Holst's orchestral suite The Planets consists of how many movements?
Seven
Several composers have since tried to add an eighth movement for Pluto, discovered in 1930.
Q 29El Apóstol, considered the world's first animated feature, was made in 1917 in which country?
Argentina
It is a lost film; its director Quirino Cristiani was paid a meagre 1,000 pesos.
Q 30Which 1927 film won the first Academy Award for Best Picture?
Wings
It remains the only fully silent film to win the award.