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70 free trivia questions for middle school students, with answers. Middle school is when trivia gets good: you finally know enough science, history and geography to be dangerous, and you still have room to be surprised. This quiz has seventy questions across the subjects a sixth-to-eighth grader meets in a week, plus a full pop culture round on the shows, games, movies and music that fill the rest of their time: Stranger Things, Wednesday, Fortnite, Among Us, Spider-Verse, Inside Out 2, Olivia Rodrigo, BTS and KPop Demon Hunters. The easy questions are ones most 11-year-olds will nail (which planet is biggest, what a prime number is, who wrote Charlotte's Web). The medium ones take a bit of thought. The hard ones will stump plenty of teachers, from the number of bones a baby is born with to the price the United States paid for Alaska. Everything is age-appropriate and every answer has been checked against a published source and carries a link, so it is safe to use as a classroom trivia game, at a family dinner or on a long car ride. No trick questions, just facts worth knowing.
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Q 01Which gas do plants release as a by-product of photosynthesis?
Oxygen
It comes from splitting water molecules, and photosynthesis is what keeps Earth's atmosphere breathable.
Q 02Which part of the cell is nicknamed the 'powerhouse of the cell'?
Mitochondrion
The nickname was popularised by a 1957 Scientific American article; it makes the energy molecule ATP.
Q 03What is the chemical formula for water?
H2O
Two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom; it is a polar molecule, which is why it dissolves so many things.
Q 04Who discovered cells in 1665 by looking at a slice of cork under a microscope?
Robert Hooke
He named them cells because they reminded him of monks' rooms in a monastery.
Q 05DNA is made of four bases: adenine, guanine, cytosine and which other?
Thymine
The two strands coil into the famous double helix; uracil takes thymine's place in RNA.
Q 06Which Russian chemist published the first widely accepted periodic table in 1869?
Dmitri Mendeleev
He left gaps for elements nobody had found yet and correctly predicted their properties.
Q 07Roughly what percentage of Earth's atmosphere is the gas we breathe to stay alive?
21%
Most of the rest is nitrogen; breathing pure oxygen at depth can actually cause seizures.
Q 08How many bones does an adult human skeleton have?
206
Babies are born with around 270; many fuse together as they grow.
Q 09How many bones is a human baby born with, roughly?
270
The skull alone starts as several separate plates that knit together in the first years of life.
Q 10What is the speed of light in a vacuum, to the nearest whole number of metres per second?
299,792,458
That works out to about a billion kilometres per hour, and light from the Sun takes about eight minutes to reach us.
Q 11Which planet is the largest in the Solar System?
Jupiter
Its Great Red Spot is a storm that has been observed since 1831.
Q 12Which planet is the hottest in the Solar System?
Venus
Its thick atmosphere traps heat to about 464 °C, hotter than Mercury even though Mercury is closer to the Sun.
Q 13What are the names of Mars's two small moons?
Phobos and Deimos
They are tiny and irregular; Olympus Mons, the tallest volcano in the Solar System, is on Mars too.
Q 14The Sun makes up about what share of all the mass in the Solar System?
Q 21How many base units does the modern metric system (SI) have?
Seven
They are the metre, kilogram, second, ampere, kelvin, mole and candela.
Q 22On what date was the Declaration of Independence adopted by the Second Continental Congress?
July 4, 1776
Thomas Jefferson was its principal author and 56 delegates signed it.
Q 23The Bill of Rights is the name for how many amendments to the US Constitution?
The first ten
They were ratified on December 15, 1791.
Q 24How much did the United States pay for the Louisiana Purchase in 1803?
99.86%
It is roughly 330,000 times the mass of Earth.
Q 15Gravity on the Moon is about what fraction of Earth's?
One-sixth
Humans first landed there with Apollo 11 on July 20, 1969; it is still the only world beyond Earth people have visited.
Q 16What is the sum of the interior angles of any triangle?
180 degrees
That is a straight angle, or pi radians; on a curved surface like a sphere it can be more.
Q 17Pi is the ratio of a circle's circumference to what?
Its diameter
It is irrational, so it can never be written exactly as a fraction; 22/7 is a rough stand-in.
Q 18What is the only even prime number?
2
A prime is a whole number greater than 1 that is not the product of two smaller whole numbers, so every other prime is odd.
Q 19Whose theorem says the square on a right triangle's hypotenuse equals the sum of the squares on the other two sides?
Pythagoras's
The hypotenuse is the side opposite the right angle; the 3-4-5 triangle is the classic example.
Q 20In Roman numerals, which letter stands for 500?
D
So 1912 is MCMXII: M is 1000, CM is 900, X is 10, II is 2.
$15 million
That worked out to about $18 per square mile for 828,000 square miles, and President Jefferson mainly wanted the port of New Orleans.
Q 25How much did the US pay Russia for Alaska in 1867?
$7.2 million
It became the 49th state on January 3, 1959, and is bigger than the next three largest states combined.
Q 26Abraham Lincoln was which number president of the United States?
16th
He issued the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863 and gave the Gettysburg Address that November.
Q 27About how many Underground Railroad missions did Harriet Tubman make to guide people to freedom?
13
She rescued around 70 people, including family and friends, and there have been plans since 2016 to put her on the $20 bill.
Q 28In which city did Rosa Parks refuse to give up her bus seat in 1955?
Montgomery
Her arrest sparked a year-long bus boycott led by a young Martin Luther King Jr.
Q 29At which 1963 event did Martin Luther King Jr. give his 'I Have a Dream' speech?
The March on Washington
The Civil Rights Act followed in 1964 and the Voting Rights Act in 1965.
Q 30The Statue of Liberty was a gift to the United States from which country?
France
Sculptor Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi designed it and Gustave Eiffel built the metal frame inside; it was dedicated in 1886.