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50 free Papua New Guinea trivia questions with answers — geography quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
Forty-four questions on Papua New Guinea, the most linguistically diverse country on Earth. Geography covers Port Moresby, Mount Wilhelm, the Sepik and Fly rivers, the Torres Strait, Rabaul's volcanoes and a country that runs two time zones and sits on the Ring of Fire. History runs from the 9,000-year-old drainage ditches at Kuk, through Portuguese and Spanish naming, German and British partition, the Kokoda Track, Australian rule and 1975 independence under Michael Somare, to the Bougainville war, the Sandline affair and the 2019 independence referendum. The rest is the culture people actually recognise: 840 languages, Tok Pisin and Hiri Motu, the kina named for a pearl shell, the bird-of-paradise on the flag, sing-sings, the wantok system, the Kula ring, sweet potato in the highlands and rugby league's Kumuls. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's articles on the country, its regions, languages and history, and the sentence that establishes it is quoted under each explanation. Suits a pub quiz, a geography classroom or anyone who has ever tried to count the languages of Melanesia.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Papua New Guinea shares its only land border with which country?
Indonesia
Indonesia controls the western half of the island of New Guinea; Australia and the Solomon Islands are neighbours only across the water.
Q 02What is the capital of Papua New Guinea?
Port Moresby
It sits in a rain shadow on the south coast and gets under 1,000 mm of rain a year, while some highland areas get eight times that.
Q 03Papua New Guinea has roughly how many known spoken languages, more than any other country?
840
Around 840 living languages are spoken in Papua New Guinea, more than a tenth of the world's total, many of them by only a few hundred people.
Q 04Which English-based creole is the most widely used language in Papua New Guinea?
Tok Pisin
Tok Pisin takes its name from 'talk' and 'pidgin'; it is spoken by millions across the country and is now the first language of many children.
Q 05Which trade pidgin is one of Papua New Guinea's officially recognised national languages?
Hiri Motu
Hiri Motu, a simplified form of the Motu language once used on coastal trading voyages, spread through the southern Papua region under British and Australian rule.
Q 06Which Spanish navigator coined the name 'New Guinea' in 1545?
Yñigo Ortiz de Retez
Yñigo Ortiz de Retez sailed along the north coast in 1545 and named the island Nueva Guinea because he thought its people resembled those of Africa's Guinea coast.
Q 07In 1884 eastern New Guinea was split between the British in the south and which power in the north?
Germany
Germany took the north-east as Kaiser-Wilhelmsland in 1884 while Britain claimed the south; Australia seized the German territory in 1914 and later ran it under a League of Nations mandate.
Q 08Papua New Guinea gained independence from Australia as a Commonwealth realm in which year?
1975
Independence came on 16 September 1975, with Gough Whitlam's Australian government having driven the timetable and the kina introduced as a separate currency that April.
Q 09Who was Papua New Guinea's first prime minister, known as the 'father of the nation'?
Michael Somare
Michael Somare, Chief Minister from 1972, led the country to independence and served about 17 years as prime minister over three separate stints.
Q 10Which mountain, at 4,509 metres, is the highest point in Papua New Guinea?
Mount Wilhelm
Mount Wilhelm was named in 1888 by the German journalist Hugo Zöller after a son of Chancellor Bismarck, and wreckage from a 1944 US aircraft crash lies on its slopes.
Q 11Which river, the longest on the island of New Guinea, winds without a delta into the Bismarck Sea?
The Sepik
The Sepik runs about 1,100 km from the central highlands to the Bismarck Sea, and its riverside villages are famed for carved haus tambaran spirit houses.
Q 12The shallow waterway separating Papua New Guinea from Australia's Cape York Peninsula is called what?
Torres Strait
Torres Strait, about 150 km wide, was dry land until rising seas cut New Guinea off from Australia roughly 8,000 to 10,000 years ago; it is named for the navigator Luis Váez de Torres.
Q 13Which region of Papua New Guinea keeps its clocks one hour ahead of the rest of the country?
Bougainville
Q 21What is the nickname of Papua New Guinea's national rugby league team?
Kumuls
Kumuls is the name of the national rugby league side, representing the country's most popular sport; the rugby union team play as the Pukpuks and the cricketers as the Barramundis.
Q 22Papua New Guinea's first UNESCO World Heritage Site, inscribed in 2008, preserves evidence of what?
Early independent agriculture
Early independent agriculture is what Kuk Swamp documents: drainage ditches there go back some 9,000 years, and bananas were being cultivated 6,400 to 6,900 years ago.
Q 23The Kuk Swamp World Heritage site sits in the highlands near which provincial capital?
Mount Hagen
Bougainville adopted its own time zone, one hour ahead of the rest of the country, in December 2014; the autonomous region lies far to the east in the Solomon Islands chain.
Q 14What share of Bougainville voters backed independence from Papua New Guinea in the 2019 referendum?
98 percent
Almost 98 percent chose independence over greater autonomy in the non-binding vote, promised under the 2001 peace agreement that ended a decade of civil war sparked by the Panguna copper mine.
Q 15What is the 1997 scandal over hiring mercenaries against island secessionists, which toppled the government, called?
The Sandline affair
The Sandline affair saw Julius Chan's government hire Sandline International to fight island secessionists; army commander Jerry Singirok refused to let the contractors deploy and Chan stepped aside.
Q 16Who became prime minister of Papua New Guinea in 2019 after Peter O'Neill resigned?
James Marape
James Marape, a former finance minister who had quit O'Neill's cabinet weeks earlier, was elected prime minister by parliament in May 2019.
Q 17The Kokoda Track crosses which mountains on its way from the north coast towards the capital?
Owen Stanley Range
The Owen Stanley Range is the spine the 96 km track climbs; Papuan carriers who hauled supplies and wounded across it became known to Australians as the 'Fuzzy Wuzzy Angels'.
Q 18Roughly how many Japanese, Australian and US servicemen died in the New Guinea campaign?
216,000
Of the roughly 216,000 dead, the great majority were Japanese, many lost to disease and starvation rather than combat; fighting dragged on until the surrender in 1945.
Q 19Papua New Guinea's currency, the kina, takes its name from what?
A pearl shell used in trade
A pearl shell used in trade gave the kina its name, a word from the Tolai people's Kuanua language; the currency is divided into 100 toea, also named after a traditional shell valuable.
Q 20Which creature is silhouetted in gold on Papua New Guinea's flag?
A Raggiana bird-of-paradise
A Raggiana bird-of-paradise in gold soars on the red half of the flag, opposite the Southern Cross on black; the design was a 1971 competition entry by 15-year-old schoolgirl Susan Karike.
Mount Hagen lies about 12 km from the swamp, which sits in the upper Wahgi Valley at roughly 1,550 metres, near the upper limit for growing taro.
Q 24Which introduced crop replaced taro as the highland staple and let farming climb to 2,700 metres?
Sweet potato
Sweet potato, known locally as kaukau, reached the highlands around 300 years ago and, thriving in poor soils and at altitude, triggered a population boom.
Q 25Roughly what share of Papua New Guinea's land is held as customary land by communities?
97 percent
Around 97 percent of the land is customary land held by clans and communities, largely unregistered, with only about 3 percent alienated as state or freehold land.
Q 26Which Papua New Guinean township was destroyed in 1994 by ash from volcanoes erupting in its own harbour?
Rabaul
Rabaul was buried by ash from Tavurvur and Vulcan in September 1994; the town had been a colonial capital and a major Japanese wartime base, and the same two volcanoes had wrecked it in 1937.
Q 27Which river rises in the Star Mountains and reaches the Gulf of Papua through a delta?
The Fly
The Fly rises in the Star Mountains near the western border and runs about 1,050 km to the Gulf of Papua; the Ok Tedi copper-gold mine sits on a headwater tributary.
Q 28Papua New Guinea's forests, the world's third-largest rainforest, hold roughly what share of all known species?
5 percent
Roughly 5 percent of the world's known species live in Papua New Guinea, on under 1 percent of the planet's land, including more than 2,000 orchid species.
Q 29Bowerbirds, monotremes and birds of paradise live on Papua New Guinea's mainland but are absent from where?
The large northeastern islands
The large northeastern islands of the Bismarck Archipelago were never joined to the mainland, so they lack those mainland groups and hold their own endemic bats and frogs instead.
Q 30Which is Papua New Guinea's largest island, home to a volcanic peninsula with famously fertile soil?
New Britain
New Britain, the largest of the country's roughly 600 islands, owes the famously rich soil of its Gazelle Peninsula to the volcanoes that ring its north-eastern harbour.