Multiple Choice Trivia
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100 free Multiple Choice trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Every question here is a proper multiple choice question: four options, exactly one correct, and the wrong ones are chosen to be believable rather than obvious. The set deliberately jumps around, from the fall of the Berlin Wall and the Ides of March to Uranus, marzipan, the Wimbledon grass and the man who co-founded Apple and sold his stake for $800. Use it as a general knowledge multiple choice quiz for a pub night, a classroom starter, a road trip or just to see how you score. Difficulty is mixed on purpose. Roughly a third of the questions are easy enough for anyone at the table, most sit in the middle, and a handful at the harder end (Cleopatra's dynasty, Freddie Mercury's birthplace, the Pony Express) are there so nobody gets a perfect score without earning it. Each answer was checked against the relevant Wikipedia article and the supporting sentence is stored with the question, so you can trust the answer key when someone at the table argues. If you want more, our General Knowledge and Trivia for Smart People sets use the same format.
30 of 100 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which US president demanded in Berlin, 'Tear down this wall'?
Reagan
Reagan kept the phrase in his 1987 speech even though State Department and National Security Council advisers fought to cut it as too provocative; the Berlin Wall opened two years later, in November 1989.
Q 02Which Roman senator, pardoned and favoured by Julius Caesar, helped lead his assassination on the Ides of March?
Brutus
Brutus hoped to save the Republic, but the murder set off a civil war in which he was beaten at Philippi and took his own life.
Q 03Napoleon's final defeat in June 1815 came at which battle?
Waterloo
Waterloo, fought on 18 June 1815 in present-day Belgium, saw Wellington and Blücher end Napoleon's Hundred Days; he was exiled to Saint Helena.
Q 04Which French king was on the throne when Parisians stormed the Bastille in July 1789?
Louis XVI
Louis XVI went to the guillotine in 1793, yet the fortress whose fall began his undoing was almost empty, holding just seven prisoners that day.
Q 05Cleopatra was the last active ruler of which Egyptian dynasty?
Ptolemaic
Cleopatra VII was the last active ruler of the Ptolemaic dynasty, founded by Ptolemy I, a Macedonian general under Alexander; Plutarch says she was the first Ptolemy to learn Egyptian.
Q 06Archduke Franz Ferdinand, whose 1914 assassination triggered World War I, was shot in which city?
Sarajevo
Sarajevo gave Gavrilo Princip a second chance: after a bomb missed the Archduke that morning, his motorcade took a wrong turn and stopped right in front of the gunman.
Q 07World War II is generally said to have begun when Germany invaded which country in September 1939?
Poland
Germany invaded Poland on 1 September 1939; Britain and France declared war on Germany two days later, on 3 September.
Q 08Machu Picchu was built by which civilization?
Inca
The Inca built Machu Picchu around 1450, probably as a royal estate for the emperor Pachacuti, then abandoned it about a century later; Hiram Bingham brought it to world attention in 1911.
Q 09The Pony Express closed in October 1861, days after which coast-to-coast link was completed?
Telegraph line
A telegraph line linked California to the East in October 1861, and the Pony Express, whose riders needed about ten days to cross the West, closed within days after only 18 months in business.
Q 10The Great Fire of London in 1666 started in a bakery on which street?
Pudding Lane
Pudding Lane was home to the king's baker, Thomas Farriner, and the fire that began in his house went on to destroy St Paul's Cathedral and about 13,000 homes.
Q 11Which English king sealed Magna Carta at Runnymede in 1215?
John
John soon appealed to Rome: about ten weeks after he sealed Magna Carta, Pope Innocent III annulled it and England slid into civil war.
Q 12Which city is the capital of Australia?
Canberra
Canberra was built from scratch as the capital, to a plan by American architect Walter Burley Griffin that won a worldwide competition; Parliament moved there from Melbourne in 1927.
Q 13Which is the world's largest island?
Greenland
Greenland is about 80% covered by an ice sheet so vast that, if it all melted, global sea levels would rise by more than seven metres.
Q 21Jørn Utzon, the architect who designed the Sydney Opera House, came from which country?
Denmark
Jørn Utzon of Denmark won the 1957 design competition but resigned in 1966, seven years before the Sydney Opera House opened in 1973.
Q 22Antarctica, despite its ice, is technically classified as what kind of environment?
A desert
A desert is defined by how little rain or snow falls, not by heat, and Antarctica gets very little; the snow that does fall never melts, building its ice sheets over thousands of years.
Q 23Which country is the largest in the world by land area?
Russia
Russia would be bigger still had it not sold Alaska to the United States in 1867 for $7.2 million.
Q 14Which is the deepest lake in the world?
Baikal
Baikal is also the world's oldest lake, and millions of years of isolation have filled it with species found nowhere else, including its own freshwater seal.
Q 15Which is the smallest sovereign state in the world by both area and population?
Vatican City
Vatican City became a state only in 1929, when the Lateran Treaty ended almost 60 years in which popes, protesting Italy's takeover of Rome, lived as self-declared prisoners in the Vatican.
Q 16Mount Fuji, visible from Tokyo on clear days, stands on which of Japan's main islands?
Honshu
Honshu's Mount Fuji is still classed as an active volcano, though it has been quiet since its last eruption in 1707.
Q 17What is the capital of Iceland?
Reykjavík
Reykjavík is the world's northernmost capital of a sovereign state, yet its buildings are kept warm by hot water piped straight from nearby hot springs.
Q 18The Amazon River empties into which ocean?
Atlantic
The Amazon carries more water to the Atlantic than any other river; geologists think it once flowed the other way, westward, until the rising Andes turned it around.
Q 19Angkor Wat, the largest religious complex in the world, is in which country?
Cambodia
Cambodia shows Angkor Wat on its national flag; King Suryavarman II built it in the 12th century as a temple to the Hindu god Vishnu, and it later became a Buddhist shrine.
Q 20Why does the Leaning Tower of Pisa lean?
It was built on soft, unstable ground
It was built on soft, unstable ground and began sinking during construction; wars then halted work for almost a century, letting the soil settle and probably saving the tower from collapse.
Q 24What is the chemical symbol for gold?
Au
Au comes from aurum, the Latin for gold: Swedish chemist Jöns Jacob Berzelius built the modern one- and two-letter symbols from the elements' Latin names.
Q 25Which element has the atomic number 2?
Helium
Helium has atomic number 2; it is named from the Greek helios (Sun) because it was first detected in the solar spectrum in 1868.
Q 26Which planet rotates almost on its side, with an extreme axial tilt?
Uranus
Uranus is tilted about 98 degrees, perhaps after a collision with an Earth-sized body long ago, which gives it the most extreme seasons in the solar system.
Q 27Which is the hardest natural material on the Mohs scale?
Diamond
Diamond is pure carbon, the same element as graphite, but each of its atoms is locked to four neighbours in a rigid lattice, making it the hardest natural substance known.
Q 28Roughly how fast does light travel in a vacuum?
300,000 km per second
Light travels about 300,000 km per second in a vacuum; the exact value, 299,792,458 metres per second, has defined the metre since 1983.
Q 29Marie Curie won Nobel Prizes in which two fields?
Physics and Chemistry
Physics and Chemistry: her name was left off the 1903 physics nomination until Pierre Curie, tipped off by a Swedish mathematician, objected; she won the 1911 chemistry prize alone.
Q 30Charles Darwin's five-year voyage from 1831 to 1836 was aboard which ship?
Beagle
Beagle carried Darwin around the world under Captain Robert FitzRoy; along the way he ate puma, which he judged 'remarkably like veal', and in the Galápagos lived on giant tortoise meat.