New Zealand Trivia
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120 free New Zealand trivia questions with answers — geography quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
64 free New Zealand trivia questions with answers. New Zealand is a small country with an outsized store of trivia: the first place to give women the vote, the home of the only flightless parrot, the setting for Middle-earth, and the country with a Guinness record for the steepest street. This quiz covers all of it in 120 questions, from the Treaty of Waitangi and the New Zealand Wars to the All Blacks' haka, the Black Caps, Lorde, pavlova and the sheep-to-people ratio. The early questions are easy enough for anyone who has watched a rugby match or seen The Lord of the Rings; the later ones get into Māori place names, Zealandia, the 2016 flag referendum and MMP, the sort of NZ trivia that separates visitors from locals. It works as a solo test or a ready-made round for a pub quiz. Every answer has been checked against a documented source and each question shows its citation and a short explanation after you answer, so the argument about who invented the pavlova can at least be argued from facts.
30 of 120 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01What is the capital city of New Zealand?
Wellington
Wellington has been the capital since 1865, when Parliament moved there from Auckland for its central position; Auckland remains the largest city by a wide margin.
Q 02Beyond its two main islands, roughly how many smaller islands does New Zealand have?
Over 700
Over 700 smaller islands lie beyond the North and South Islands, from the subtropical Kermadecs to the subantarctic Auckland and Campbell groups; Stewart Island is the largest of them.
Q 03Which country's secret agents sank the Greenpeace ship Rainbow Warrior in Auckland harbour in 1985?
France
France sent the agents because the ship was about to lead a protest against its nuclear tests at Moruroa; the bombs killed photographer Fernando Pereira, and France later apologised and paid reparations.
Q 04Which British explorer became the first European to set foot on and map New Zealand, in 1769?
James Cook
James Cook landed at Poverty Bay in October 1769 from the Endeavour and charted the coastline so accurately that his map stayed in use for decades.
Q 05Which national day does New Zealand mark on 6 February?
Waitangi Day
Waitangi Day recalls the first signing of the Treaty of Waitangi in the Bay of Islands on 6 February 1840; about 500 more signatures were later gathered at other places around the country.
Q 06In 1893, New Zealand became the first country in the world to do what?
Grant all women the right to vote
Grant all women the right to vote: the governor signed the Electoral Act on 19 September 1893 after a petition bearing nearly 32,000 signatures, and women voted in a general election ten weeks later.
Q 07Alongside English and Māori, which of these has official status in New Zealand?
Sign language
Sign language, in full New Zealand Sign Language, became official in April 2006 under an act that lets deaf people use it throughout the legal system.
Q 08What is the most common English translation of Aotearoa, the Māori name for New Zealand?
Land of the long white cloud
"Land of the long white cloud" is the usual reading of ao tea roa; in one tradition the navigator Kupe's wife cried 'He ao!' (a cloud!) on sighting the land.
Q 09The kiwi is the only bird in the world with its nostrils located where?
At the tip of its beak
At the tip of its beak is where the kiwi's nostrils open, unique among birds; it probes the soil and sniffs out worms and grubs by night.
Q 10A kiwi egg can weigh up to roughly what proportion of the female's body weight?
20%
20% is the usual figure, against about 5% for a human baby; the reward is a chick that hatches fully feathered, like a miniature adult, and needs little feeding from its parents.
Q 11DNA studies show the kiwi's closest relatives were which extinct animals?
Madagascar's elephant birds
Madagascar's elephant birds were the kiwi's closest relatives, a 2014 ancient-DNA study found, overturning the old assumption that the kiwi was a small cousin of the moa.
Q 12What is the traditional name of the haka the All Blacks have performed before matches for over a century?
Ka Mate
Ka Mate is said to have been composed around 1820 by the Ngāti Toa chief Te Rauparaha after he hid from pursuers in a kūmara pit and climbed out alive; the All Blacks took it on their 1905 tour.
Q 13At which stadium did the All Blacks win both the 1987 and 2011 Rugby World Cup finals?
Eden Park
Q 21Auckland, New Zealand's largest city, is built on a field of about 50 of which landforms?
Volcanoes
Volcanoes, about 50 of them, dot the Auckland field; the youngest, Rangitoto, rose from the sea only about 600 years ago, and human footprints survive in its ash on the island next door.
Q 22Auckland is often described as the world's largest city of which group of people?
Polynesians
Polynesians made Auckland their largest city after the 1950s, when its expanding industries looked to Samoa and other Pacific islands for workers and large-scale migration began.
Q 23Which Peter Jackson film won all 11 Oscars it was nominated for, tying the record for most wins?
The Return of the King
Eden Park in Auckland staged both finals: the All Blacks won the first World Cup there in 1987, fell short at the next five tournaments, then scraped home 8–7 on the same ground in 2011.
Q 14What nickname is given to the 1905 All Blacks, the first national New Zealand rugby team to tour the northern hemisphere?
The Originals
The Originals won 34 of their 35 matches, losing only 3–0 to Wales in Cardiff, where a try claimed by Bob Deans was not awarded, a ruling New Zealand rugby lore has disputed ever since.
Q 15In which trade did Edmund Hillary work with his father and brother before climbing Everest in 1953?
Beekeeping
Beekeeping was the family trade: he joined his father and brother full-time in 1938, tending more than a thousand hives each summer, which left his winters free for climbing.
Q 16In 1992, who became the first living person other than the monarch to appear on a New Zealand banknote?
Edmund Hillary
Edmund Hillary has been on the five-dollar note since 1992, and the mountain beside his portrait is not Everest but one of his favourite New Zealand peaks.
Q 17What is the longest river in New Zealand?
Waikato
The Waikato runs 425 km from Mount Ruapehu to the west coast, but until late in the last ice age it flowed north to the Firth of Thames instead, before built-up debris turned it aside.
Q 18Lake Taupō, New Zealand's largest lake, sits inside what kind of geological feature?
A volcanic caldera
A volcanic caldera holds the lake: it fills the hollow left when the enormous Ōruanui eruption emptied the volcano beneath it more than 25,000 years ago.
Q 19Which New Zealand mountain lost 10 metres in a 1991 rock avalanche?
Aoraki / Mount Cook
Aoraki / Mount Cook, the country's highest peak, lost about 10 metres when millions of cubic metres of rock and ice fell from its summit in December 1991; erosion has since trimmed it to 3,724 m.
Q 20Which superlative does the capital of New Zealand hold among the capitals of the world?
Southernmost of any
Southernmost of any national capital, it sits at about 41°S beside the strait that splits the country, a gap that funnels the Roaring Forties westerlies and makes it famously windy too.
The Return of the King swept all 11 of its categories in 2004, matching Ben-Hur and Titanic, after the first two films of the trilogy had each been nominated for Best Picture and lost.
Q 24The four red stars on New Zealand's flag represent which constellation?
The Southern Cross
The Southern Cross appears as four red stars on a flag drawn up in 1869 only to mark government ships; it replaced the Union Jack as the national flag in 1902.
Q 25In New Zealand's 2016 flag referendum, voters kept the existing flag over a design featuring which plant?
Silver fern
The silver fern design won a first vote among five options, then lost the March 2016 run-off with about 43% to the existing flag's 57%, so Prime Minister John Key's two-stage referendum changed nothing.
Q 26The kākāpō holds which pair of records among the world's parrots?
Only flightless and heaviest
Only flightless and heaviest among parrots, the kākāpō had no mammal predators on the ground and so no need to fly, which left it helpless when people brought cats, rats and stoats.
Q 27The tuatara has what unusual feature on top of its head?
A third eye
A third eye, with its own lens and retina, shows on hatchlings and is scaled over within months; it registers light and dark, and the tuatara is the last survivor of a reptile order from the dinosaur age.
Q 28Despite its name, the kiwifruit is native to which country?
China
China is the kiwifruit's homeland: a visiting headmistress brought seeds to New Zealand in 1904, and growers called it the Chinese gooseberry until the exporter Turners and Growers renamed it kiwifruit in 1959.
Q 29An earthquake at lunchtime on 22 February 2011 killed 185 people in which New Zealand city?
Christchurch
Christchurch lost 185 people, more than 130 of them in two collapsed office buildings, although a stronger quake nearby nearly six months earlier had struck before dawn and caused no mass fatalities.
Q 30Rotorua's famous smell of rotten eggs comes from emissions of which gas?
Hydrogen sulphide
Hydrogen sulphide, seeping from the geothermal field beneath the city, gives Rotorua its rotten-egg smell; the same heat powers the Pōhutu Geyser and the boiling mud pools at Whakarewarewa.