Midwest Trivia
0Loading crowd target
0Loading crowd target
6correct to beat the crowd
95 free Midwest trivia questions with answers — geography quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
40 free Midwest trivia questions with answers. Midwest trivia gets treated as filler. It should not be: this is the region that holds a fifth of the world's surface fresh water, feeds much of the country, gave rock and roll its name, and invented deep-dish pizza, Kool-Aid and a chilli that is served on spaghetti. These forty questions run through the geography and demographics, then the landmarks and the food. There are questions on the man who wanted Mount Rushmore to feature Sacagawea instead of presidents, the architect who drew the Gateway Arch in 1947, the four-lap qualifying rule at the Indy 500, and the myth about what is in Cincinnati chili. Every answer is written against a sourced account with the sentence that establishes it attached, and the difficulty runs from easy city-spotting to detail most residents would not know. Good for a regional quiz night, a road trip, or settling an argument about pizza.
30 of 95 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01The 1989 baseball film Field of Dreams was shot on a farm in which Midwestern state?
Iowa
Iowa: the film's diamond was built on a farm near Dyersville and kept as a visitor site afterwards; in 2021 the Yankees and White Sox played a major-league game beside it.
Q 02Which Midwestern metropolitan area is the second largest in the region?
Detroit
Detroit's metro area, about 4.4 million people, is the Midwest's second largest, yet the city at its heart has lost about two-thirds of its residents since peaking at 1.85 million in 1950.
Q 03Which ancestry is most commonly reported in the Midwest?
German
German is the Midwest's most commonly reported ancestry; so many communities still spoke the language in 1918 that Iowa's governor, in a wartime backlash, banned foreign languages in schools and public places.
Q 04Which Midwestern state is the most populous?
Illinois
Illinois counted about 12.8 million residents in 2020, a million more than runner-up Ohio, even though it was one of only three states whose census count fell from 2010.
Q 05What is the Midwest's nickname, thanks to its grain harvests?
The nation's breadbasket
The Midwest is called the nation's breadbasket because its deep prairie soils grow much of America's corn, soybeans, wheat and oats.
Q 06Which population movement transformed Midwestern cities in the early 20th century?
The Great Migration
The Great Migration carried some six million Black Southerners to northern and western cities between about 1916 and 1970; Delta blues travelled with them and was electrified in Chicago's clubs.
Q 07Which Cleveland disc jockey popularised the term 'rock and roll' in 1951?
Alan Freed
Alan Freed took the phrase from his Cleveland radio show to the stage in 1952 with the Moondog Coronation Ball, often called the first rock concert; police stopped it early when thousands more fans than seats turned up.
Q 08Which Midwestern state has Lansing as its capital?
Michigan
Lansing has been Michigan's capital since 1847, when legislators moved it inland from Detroit; the much larger Detroit remains the state's biggest city.
Q 09Which presidential-election fact held true for Ohio through 2024?
No Republican has won without it
No Republican has ever won the presidency without carrying Ohio, a streak intact through 2024; Ohio's bellwether reputation, by contrast, ended when it backed Trump while Biden won in 2020.
Q 10How many Great Lakes are there?
Five
The five Great Lakes are Superior, Michigan, Huron, Erie and Ontario, draining to the Atlantic through the St. Lawrence River.
Q 11Which two Great Lakes are hydrologically a single body of water?
Michigan and Huron
Lakes Michigan and Huron are joined by a strait five miles wide, so their water sits at one level and hydrologists count them as a single lake, Michigan-Huron.
Q 12Where was deep-dish pizza invented?
Pizzeria Uno in Chicago
Pizzeria Uno in Chicago served the first deep-dish pies in 1943; who devised the recipe is still argued over, with owners Ike Sewell and Ric Riccardo and their kitchen staff all given credit.
Q 13Which two Chicago-area pizzerias were founded by sons of a longtime manager of the first deep-dish restaurant?
Q 21The Gateway Arch's weighted catenary is based on the curve formed by what?
A hanging chain
A hanging chain sags into a catenary; the arch is that curve turned upside down and 'weighted', its legs thicker than its top, and it stands 630 feet tall and exactly as wide.
Q 22Which architect designed the Gateway Arch?
Eero Saarinen
Eero Saarinen won the 1947-48 design competition for the arch; he died in 1961, before construction began in 1963, and the monument opened to the public in 1967.
Q 23In which Midwestern city does the Gateway Arch stand?
St. Louis
St. Louis's Gateway Arch, on the west bank of the Mississippi, commemorates the city's role as the gateway to the West after the Louisiana Purchase.
Lou Malnati's and Pizano's
Lou Malnati's and Pizano's were opened in 1971 and 1991 by Lou and Rudy Malnati Jr.; their father, Rudy Sr., managed the original deep-dish restaurant for years and is credited by some with its recipe.
Q 14Which Cincinnati chili chain did Nicholas Lambrinides found in 1949?
Skyline Chili
Skyline Chili opened its first parlor in Price Hill in 1949, named for the view of downtown Cincinnati; founder Nicholas Lambrinides had cooked at Empress Chili.
Q 15From which region did the immigrant brothers who created Cincinnati chili come?
The Balkans
The Balkans: brothers Tom and John Kiradjieff, from a village in what is now northern Greece, began selling their spiced meat sauce in 1922 at the Empress burlesque theatre, which gave Empress Chili its name.
Q 16In which state is Mount Rushmore?
South Dakota
South Dakota's Black Hills hold Mount Rushmore, a peak named for Charles Rushmore, a New York lawyer who came to the hills in 1885 to check mining claims.
Q 17Who sculpted Mount Rushmore?
Gutzon Borglum
Gutzon Borglum, who had earlier begun the Confederate carving at Stone Mountain, led the work until his death in March 1941; his son Lincoln finished it that October.
Q 18Whose idea was the Mount Rushmore carving originally?
The state historian, Doane Robinson
The state historian, Doane Robinson, proposed giant carvings in 1923 to pull tourists to the Black Hills, then wrote to a sculptor who was busy carving Georgia's Stone Mountain.
Q 19Which figures did Mount Rushmore's original proposer want carved instead of presidents?
Heroes of the American West
Heroes of the American West were the first plan, among them Lewis and Clark, Sacagawea, Red Cloud and Buffalo Bill Cody; the sculptor pushed for presidents to give the work national appeal.
Q 20Which Mount Rushmore president was carved first?
George Washington
George Washington's head came first; Jefferson was begun on his other side, but the rock there proved unsound, so that carving was blasted away and started again.
Q 24What let the first Indianapolis 500 winner race without a mechanic?
Rear-view mirror
Rear-view mirror: it did the riding mechanic's job of watching for cars behind, so Ray Harroun could race his Marmon Wasp alone in 1911; the next year, riding mechanics were made compulsory.
Q 25What does the winner of the Indianapolis 500 traditionally drink?
Milk
Milk: Louis Meyer asked for buttermilk in Victory Lane after winning in the 1930s, and the bottle became a fixture from 1956, when dairy companies began sponsoring the prize.
Q 26What is the Indianapolis Motor Speedway's nickname?
The Brickyard
The Brickyard got its name in 1909, when the track's first surface of crushed stone and tar broke up and was repaved with 3.2 million bricks; a strip of them still marks the start-finish line.
Q 27Which song's chorus is sung before the Indianapolis 500?
Back Home Again in Indiana
'Back Home Again in Indiana' has been sung before the race since 1946, yet it is not the state song; that is 'On the Banks of the Wabash, Far Away', from which it borrows a melody line and several phrases.
Q 28Kool-Aid was invented in the town of Hastings, in which Midwestern state?
Nebraska
Nebraska: Edwin Perkins launched the powdered drink from Hastings in 1927, but success carried it off, and by 1931 he had moved the company to Chicago; Hastings still holds a Kool-Aid Days festival each August.
Q 29What was Kool-Aid's liquid predecessor called?
Fruit Smack
Fruit Smack was the bottled syrup Edwin Perkins sold by mail through his Perkins Products Company in Hastings before he reformulated it as a powder in 1927.
Q 30Why did Kool-Aid's inventor turn his drink into a powder?
To cut shipping costs
To cut shipping costs: his bottled fruit concentrate was heavy, and the four-ounce glass bottles often broke or leaked in transit, so in 1927 Edwin Perkins dried it into a powder sold in paper packets.