Insurance Trivia
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78 free Insurance trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
53 free Insurance trivia questions with answers. Insurance is older than banks, older than paper money and older than most countries: Babylonian merchants were paying to have shipping loans forgiven 3,700 years ago. This quiz follows the trade from the Code of Hammurabi through the Great Fire of London and Edward Lloyd's coffee house to the bell that still hangs in Lloyd's Underwriting Room, the Titanic policy, and the fire company Benjamin Franklin organised in Philadelphia. It also covers the words the industry uses (deductibles and excesses, actuaries, subrogation, retrocession, utmost good faith), the mascots everyone recognises (the gecko, the duck, Flo, Snoopy, the Rock of Gibraltar), the big American programmes (Social Security, Medicare, the Affordable Care Act, the FDIC) and the odd corners such as pet insurance and Michael Flatley's legs. It suits agents, actuaries, finance students and anyone who has ever argued with a claims adjuster. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia or an official source, and the citation is shown under each question.
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Q 01Which Babylonian legal text of c.1750 BC had shipping-loan rules seen as early insurance?
Code of Hammurabi
Code of Hammurabi provisions reflect a system in which a merchant borrowing to fund a shipment paid the lender extra, and the loan was cancelled if the cargo was stolen or lost at sea.
Q 02A contract of 1347, long counted as the oldest known insurance policy, was drawn up in which Italian city?
Genoa
Genoa is credited with inventing insurance contracts that stood apart from loans, and its merchants also set up insurance pools backed by pledges of landed estates.
Q 03The Great Fire of London, which spurred England's first fire insurers, began on which street?
Pudding Lane
Pudding Lane was where Thomas Farriner's bakery caught fire in September 1666; the blaze destroyed more than 13,000 houses, and rebuilding the city gave the new fire insurers their customers.
Q 04Which economist set up England's first fire insurance company, the "Insurance Office for Houses", in 1681?
Nicholas Barbon
Nicholas Barbon trained as a physician but became London's most prominent builder after the Great Fire, and with eleven associates he offered fire cover for up to 5,000 of the city's houses.
Q 05What were the metal plaques that 1700s British insurers fixed to buildings for their own brigades called?
Fire marks
Fire marks showed an insurer's own brigade which buildings it covered; on 1 January 1833 London's insurers pooled their separate brigades into a single force.
Q 06Which London insurer, founded in 1710, lived on in the RSA name until 2025?
Sun Fire Office
Sun Fire Office became Sun Alliance in 1959 and Royal & Sun Alliance in 1996, shortened to RSA in 2008; its Canadian owner Intact retired the name in 2025.
Q 07Lloyd's of London takes its name from Edward Lloyd, who ran what kind of business?
A coffee house
A coffee house on Tower Street, run by Lloyd by 1688, drew sailors, merchants and shipowners; he kept them supplied with reliable shipping news, and insurers gathered there to do business.
Q 08What are the individual private backers of the Lloyd's of London market traditionally called?
Names
Names are the individuals who backed Lloyd's syndicates with their entire personal wealth under unlimited liability; asbestos losses in the early 1990s ruined many of them.
Q 09At Lloyd's, backers traditionally accepted a share of a risk by signing beneath its details on which document?
A slip
A slip was the sheet on which a Lloyd's broker set out a risk; each backer signed beneath it with the share he would take, the literal writing-under that the trade's title describes.
Q 10In 1984, insurers led by Lloyd's helped pay for a Space Shuttle mission to do what?
Retrieve two stranded satellites
Retrieve two stranded satellites: Westar 6 and Palapa B2 had been left in useless low orbits after their motors failed, so their insurers helped fund Discovery's astronauts to bring both home.
Q 11The Lloyd's Underwriting Room bell came from which former French frigate, wrecked off the Dutch coast in 1799?
HMS Lutine
HMS Lutine sank in a storm off Vlieland on 9 October 1799 with a cargo of gold insured at Lloyd's, which is why her bell, salvaged in 1858, hangs in the Underwriting Room.
Q 12One stroke of the Lloyd's Underwriting Room bell signalled what about an overdue ship?
It had been lost
One stroke of the bell carried a verdict on the overdue ship: It had been lost. Two strokes meant a safe arrival, so underwriters stopped trading reinsurance on the vessel the moment its fate was known.
Q 13Which shipping line insured Titanic's hull for £1 million at Lloyd's?
White Star
Q 21What is the British English term for what US insurers call a deductible?
The excess
The excess is the British term for the first slice of a claim the policyholder bears; choosing a higher excess usually buys a cheaper premium because the insurer no longer handles many small claims.
Q 22What term describes a reinsurer passing part of a risk on to yet another reinsurer?
Retrocession
Retrocession is reinsurance of reinsurance; layers of it created the London market 'spiral' after the 1988 Piper Alpha explosion, when syndicates found they held the same loss several times over.
Q 23Which doctrine lets an insurer that paid a claim sue the party at fault?
Subrogation
White Star Line's broker placed the cover three months before the sinking at a premium of just £7,500, and the insurers settled the £1 million loss within 30 days.
Q 14After the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, Lloyd's underwriter Cuthbert Heath told his local agent to do what?
Pay every claim in full
Heath's telegram said to Pay every claim in full, irrespective of policy terms, while other insurers disputed whether fire policies covered fires caused by the earthquake; the decision cemented Lloyd's reputation in the American market.
Q 15In 2010 a shampoo maker took out a $1 million Lloyd's policy on which NFL star's hair?
Troy Polamalu
Troy Polamalu had not cut his hair since 2000, and in 2006 a Kansas City Chiefs player tackled him by it; Procter & Gamble, whose shampoo he advertised, bought the policy.
Q 16The Lloyd's building at 1 Lime Street, completed in 1986, was designed by which architect?
Richard Rogers
Richard Rogers put the lifts, ducts and stairs on the outside to leave an uncluttered space within, the inside-out idea he and Renzo Piano had first tried at the Pompidou Centre in Paris.
Q 17Which Founding Father organised the Philadelphia Contributionship fire insurer in 1752?
Benjamin Franklin
Benjamin Franklin had started Philadelphia's first volunteer fire brigade in 1736, and with fellow firefighters he set up the Contributionship as a mutual whose policyholders shared one another's losses.
Q 18In 1781 the Philadelphia Contributionship required customers to remove what from in front of their houses?
Trees
Trees in front of a house were banned because they could hinder firefighters and catch fire themselves; a rival insurer that accepted them became known as the Green Tree.
Q 19Which astronomer published a pioneering life table in 1693, built from Breslau's birth and death records?
Edmond Halley
Edmond Halley improved on John Graunt's cruder tables by working from Breslau's records, and he used them to work out what a life annuity should cost at each age.
Q 20Which job title did Edward Rowe Mores give the Equitable Society's chief official in 1762?
Actuary
Actuary then meant a registrar or clerk, from the Latin for account-keeper; Mores gave the title to the Equitable's chief official, and William Morgan's 56 years in the post made it the profession's name.
Subrogation lets the insurer step into its customer's shoes to recover from the party at fault; its rights are wholly derivative, so it can never recover more than the customer could have.
Q 24What do economists call the tendency of people to take more risks once insurance covers the losses?
Moral hazard
Moral hazard became a modern research field with Kenneth Arrow's work in the 1960s, and insurers counter it with deductibles and co-payments so that customers still bear part of each loss.
Q 25Which reinsurer was founded in 1863 after a fire destroyed much of the Alpine town of Glarus?
Swiss Re
Swiss Re was founded in Zürich in 1863 because the 1861 fire, which destroyed two-thirds of Glarus, had cost far more than local fire insurance could cover.
Q 26Insurance contracts are governed by which Latin principle requiring full disclosure of material facts?
Uberrima fides
Uberrima fides, utmost good faith, obliges the insured to disclose all material facts before the contract is made, the opposite of the buyer-beware rule that governs most other sales.
Q 27What do the letters in the auto insurer GEICO stand for?
Government Employees Insurance Company
Government Employees Insurance Company was never a government body; Leo and Lillian Goodwin founded it in San Antonio in 1936 to sell low-cost car insurance to federal workers and military officers.
Q 28Warren Buffett first visited GEICO in 1951 after learning that which Columbia teacher of his sat on its board?
Benjamin Graham
Benjamin Graham's link sent Buffett by train to Washington on a Saturday, where a janitor let him in and executive Lorimer Davidson spent four hours explaining the business to the student.
Q 29Which company, then a textile manufacturer, moved into insurance in 1967 by buying National Indemnity?
Berkshire Hathaway
Berkshire Hathaway used cash from its textile mills to buy the Omaha insurer, the first business it acquired under Warren Buffett, and in 1985 it shut the mills for good.
Q 30State Farm, the insurer founded in 1922, has its headquarters in which Illinois city?
Bloomington
Retired farmer George J. Mecherle founded State Farm in Bloomington in 1922 as a mutual offering farmers cheaper rates than urban drivers paid, and the company kept its headquarters in Bloomington.