Interesting Trivia
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138 free Interesting trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
These are the trivia questions people repeat to friends afterwards. Sharks are older than trees. Cleopatra lived closer to the Moon landing than to the pyramids. Oxford was teaching students two centuries before the Aztecs founded their capital. Cats cannot taste sweetness, the Amazon has no bridges, and a German church is halfway through a concert that will take 639 years. There are 138 questions here, spread across space, science, animals, history, geography, food, technology, music, art and games. Every question has one right answer, three plausible wrong ones and a short explanation that adds the detail worth remembering. Nothing here is a myth or an urban legend: each fact was checked against an encyclopaedia or primary source before it went in, and every question shows its source. Difficulty runs from things you half-remember to things you will swear cannot be true. Play the set straight through, or use it to run the round of a quiz that people actually talk about afterwards.
30 of 138 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Teaching at which university, the oldest in the English-speaking world, is recorded as early as 1096?
Oxford
Oxford had teaching by 1096 and grew fast after 1167, when Henry II banned English students from attending the University of Paris.
Q 02Cleopatra lived closest in time to which of these events?
Apollo 11 in 1969
Apollo 11 in 1969 came about 2,000 years after Cleopatra died in 30 BC, yet the pyramid-builders of Giza had lived some 2,500 years before she was born.
Q 03Which of these appeared on Earth first?
Sharks
Sharks go back more than 400 million years, before the first trees appeared, and have since survived five mass extinctions, including the one that ended the dinosaurs' reign.
Q 04Which planet has the hottest surface in the Solar System?
Venus
Venus is hotter than Mercury despite orbiting almost twice as far from the Sun, because its dense carbon dioxide atmosphere traps heat in a runaway greenhouse effect.
Q 05Claude Shannon's famous estimate of 10 to the power of 120 is a lower bound on what?
Possible games of chess
Possible games of chess number at least 10 to the power of 120 by Claude Shannon's 1950 estimate, which he made to show that no computer could ever play by checking every line.
Q 06Laser ranging to Apollo reflectors shows the Moon drifting away from Earth by about how much per year?
3.8 centimetres
3.8 centimetres a year is the rate at which tides push the Moon outward, and the same tidal drag is slowing Earth's spin, so our days are very gradually getting longer.
Q 07Which animal's skin secretes 'blood sweat', a red fluid that works as sunscreen and antibiotic?
Hippopotamus
Hippopotamus 'blood sweat' contains no blood: it oozes out colourless and turns red within minutes thanks to two pigments, then slowly darkens to brown.
Q 08What saved the Eiffel Tower from demolition when its 20-year permit expired in 1909?
Its use as a radio antenna
Its use as a radio antenna made the tower too valuable to scrap, a reprieve for a structure that Paris artists had denounced in an 1887 protest letter as useless and monstrous.
Q 09Lightning heats nearby air to about what temperature, several times hotter than the Sun's surface?
30,000 C
30,000 C is about five times as hot as the Sun's surface, and air heated that fast expands explosively, sending out the shock wave we hear as thunder.
Q 10For thousands of years up to about 5,000 years ago, which desert was covered in grasses, trees and lakes?
The Sahara
The Sahara turned green when a slow wobble in Earth's axis strengthened the African monsoon, and rock paintings from those wetter times show people who appear to be swimming.
Q 11Measured from its base on the sea floor rather than sea level, which mountain is taller than Everest?
Mauna Kea
Mauna Kea is a volcano that grew up from the Pacific floor, so more than half of its 10,000-plus metres is hidden underwater and Everest keeps the title of highest summit above sea level.
Q 12Vanilla flavouring comes from the cured seed pods of what kind of plant?
An orchid
An orchid from Mexico, vanilla could not be farmed elsewhere until 1841, when Edmond Albius, an enslaved 12-year-old on Réunion, worked out the quick hand-pollination method still used today.
Q 13Before the Spanish conquest, what did Mesoamerican peoples commonly use cocoa beans as?
Currency
Q 21Alexander Bain patented an early version of which device in 1843, over 30 years before the telephone?
The fax
The fax grew out of Bain's work on electric clocks: his design used a stylus on a swinging pendulum to scan a message line by line, with a second pendulum kept in step to copy it at the far end.
Q 22Tsutomu Yamaguchi is the only person officially recognised by Japan as having survived what?
Both atomic bombings
Both atomic bombings caught him three days apart: burned in Hiroshima on a business trip, he went home to Nagasaki and was telling his boss about the blast when the second bomb exploded.
Q 23Which country's Althing, founded in 930, is called the world's oldest legislature?
Currency in cacao beans bought everyday goods, with a turkey hen costing about 100 beans in one 16th-century price list, and rulers even collected the beans as tribute.
Q 14Which giant volcano on Mars is the tallest known in the Solar System?
Olympus Mons
Olympus Mons could grow so tall because the crust of Mars does not move: it sat still over one hot spot, so lava kept piling up in the same place, helped by the planet's weak gravity.
Q 15With the Sun holding over 99% of the Solar System's mass, which planet accounts for most of the rest?
Jupiter
Jupiter is more than twice as massive as all the other planets put together, yet it still amounts to less than a thousandth of the Sun's mass.
Q 16Astronauts grow taller in orbit because weightlessness lets which part of the body stretch out?
The spine
The spine relaxes and its vertebrae spread apart once gravity stops compressing them, adding a few centimetres of height that disappear within months of returning to Earth.
Q 17Which part of the human body has no blood vessels and gets its oxygen from the air via tears?
The cornea
The cornea has no blood vessels because they would cloud the eye's clear window, so oxygen from the air dissolves in the tear film and soaks in instead.
Q 18Which Ice Age animal was still alive when the Great Pyramid was built?
Woolly mammoth
Woolly mammoth herds isolated on Wrangel Island, off Siberia, outlasted most of their mainland kin by thousands of years, dying out only about 4,000 years ago, centuries after the Great Pyramid went up.
Q 19France last used the guillotine in the same year that which blockbuster film opened?
Star Wars
Star Wars opened in May 1977, and that September Hamida Djandoubi was guillotined in a Marseille prison, the last execution before France abolished the death penalty in 1981.
Q 20Which American civil rights leader was born in 1929, the same year as Anne Frank?
Martin Luther King Jr.
Martin Luther King Jr. was born in Atlanta five months before Anne Frank; they seem to belong to different eras because she died at 15, a decade before he came to prominence.
Iceland
Iceland's Althing began as a yearly gathering of chieftains, and around the year 1000 it settled whether the island would turn Christian by handing the decision to its pagan lawspeaker.
Q 24Which language is written with just 13 letters, including a glottal-stop mark called the okina?
Hawaiian
Hawaiian was first written down in the 1820s by American missionaries, who settled on five vowels and a handful of consonants; letters such as B, R and T now appear only in borrowed words.
Q 25Which country has around 840 living languages, more than any other on Earth?
Papua New Guinea
Papua New Guinea's languages average only about ten thousand speakers each, so people from different villages talk to one another in Tok Pisin, an English-based creole.
Q 26Which microscopic animals, nicknamed water bears, have survived the vacuum of space?
Tardigrades
Tardigrades survive by drying out into a dormant state called a tun; in 2007 dried specimens were flown on a satellite, exposed to open space and revived once back on Earth.
Q 27Which Mexican salamander can regrow lost limbs, gills and even parts of its brain?
Axolotl
The axolotl never grows up, keeping its feathery gills and larval form for life; it is common in labs and pet shops yet critically endangered in the wild.
Q 28What lets a cockroach keep breathing for weeks after losing its head?
Air holes along its body
Air holes along its body, called spiracles, pipe oxygen straight to the tissues without any help from the brain, so a headless cockroach can carry on for weeks.
Q 29The dark colour of a giraffe's 45 cm tongue is thought to protect it from what?
Sunburn
Sunburn is the likely threat, because the tongue spends much of the day out in the open, reaching around the thorns of acacia trees to strip their leaves.
Q 30What colour is a polar bear's skin beneath its fur?
Black
Black skin soaks up the sun's warmth, and the fur above it is not really white: each guard hair is a clear, hollow tube that scatters the light.