Rain
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50 free Rain trivia questions with answers — science & nature quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Rain is the most ordinary weather there is, and one of the strangest. The drops are not the shape most people draw, the smell that rises from a dry pavement has a name and a chemistry of its own, and on other worlds the showers are made of things nobody would want to stand under. This quiz covers rain from every side. There are questions on how clouds turn vapour into falling water, the instruments and inventors that measure it and keep it off, the wettest and driest corners of the planet, and the gods, saints and sayings people have relied on to explain a downpour. Songs, films and paintings with rain in the title get their turn as well, along with the sports that have learned to live with a washed-out day. It is pitched for curious general players, with a handful of harder questions for weather enthusiasts. Every answer comes with a short explanation, so even a wrong guess leaves something to take away.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which shape do large raindrops take as they fall, despite the teardrop seen in cartoons and weather icons?
A hamburger bun
A hamburger bun is the closest match, because big drops flatten on the bottom as they fall. The very largest are shaped like parachutes.
Q 02Which word, coined by two Australian scientists in 1964, names the earthy smell of rain on dry ground?
Petrichor
Petrichor joins the Greek for stone with ichor, the fluid said to run in the veins of the gods. Its coiners went on to suggest that the compounds behind the scent slow the sprouting of seeds.
Q 03Which gemstone do scientists think rains down like hailstones deep inside the ice giants Uranus and Neptune?
Diamond
Diamond crystals may form thousands of kilometres down, where crushing pressure squeezes carbon out of the planets' icy mix. High-pressure experiments on Earth support the idea.
Q 04Which South American desert, caught in a double rain shadow, has weather stations that have never recorded rainfall?
The Atacama
The Atacama is sealed off from moist air by the Andes on one side and the Chilean Coast Range on the other. The soil holds so little life that Mars mission instruments are tested there.
Q 05Which country is home to Mawsynram and Cherrapunji, neighbouring hill towns ranked among the wettest places on Earth?
India
India's Meghalaya state, whose name means the abode of clouds, holds both towns, about 15 km apart in the Khasi Hills. Mawsynram averages close to twelve metres of rain a year.
Q 06On which planet does acid rain fall from the clouds but boil away before ever reaching the ground?
Venus
Venus is the hottest planet in the solar system, around 464 °C at the surface, so its acid drops evaporate on the way down and never land.
Q 07Fans of which sport were first handed rain checks, tickets for a later game when weather stopped play?
Baseball
Baseball clubs were handing them out by the 1870s, and a tear-off stub on the ticket later made the system simple. The phrase now covers any politely postponed offer.
Q 08Which act took It's Raining Men into the charts after Donna Summer and Barbra Streisand turned it down?
The Weather Girls
The Weather Girls were still called the Two Tons when the song reached them in 1982. Paul Shaffer, who helped compose it, spent the next three decades as David Letterman's bandleader.
Q 09Which Hawaiian island holds Mount Waialeale, a summit that averages more than 370 inches of rain a year?
Kauai
Kauai holds the peak, whose name means rippling or overflowing water. The summit sits just below the height where trade-wind clouds stop rising, so they stall and pour.
Q 10Which star danced through a studio downpour with a high fever for the title number of Singin' in the Rain?
Gene Kelly
Gene Kelly was running a temperature of 103 °F while he splashed through the puddles. The old tale that milk was added to make the drops show on camera is a myth: backlighting did the job.
Q 11Which compound made by soil bacteria gives rain its earthy smell and beetroot its earthy taste?
Geosmin
Geosmin is Greek for earth smell, and human noses can pick it up at a few parts per trillion. One idea is that the skill helped our ancestors find scarce water.
Q 12Which Latin-named streaks of rain hang beneath a cloud and evaporate before they can reach the ground?
Virga
Virga takes its name from the Latin for a rod or twig. As the drops vanish they chill pockets of air, which can plunge as microbursts that are a serious hazard to aircraft.
Q 13Which English architect built Britain's first tipping-bucket rain gauge with Robert Hooke in 1662?
Christopher Wren
Q 21Which Central American country holds a yearly festival in Yoro to celebrate its mysterious Rain of Fish?
Honduras
Honduras has held the festival since 1998, timed to the first big storm of May or June. Fish are found on the ground afterwards, although the nearest sea is about 72 km away.
Q 22Which saint's day, 15 July, is said in British weather lore to decide whether rain will fall for weeks afterwards?
St Swithun
St Swithun, a bishop of Winchester, asked to be buried outdoors where raindrops from the eaves could fall on his grave. The proverb promises forty days of rain if his day is wet.
Q 23Which Aztec rain god shared the top of Tenochtitlan's Templo Mayor with the war god Huitzilopochtli?
Tlaloc
Christopher Wren was a professor of astronomy before he was a builder of churches. His gauge tipped itself empty each time it filled, so the number of tips recorded the rainfall.
Q 14Which country's King Sejong had the Cheugugi, an early standardised rain gauge, sent to every province in the 1440s?
Korea
Korea's officials had been judging rainfall by the depth of puddles until the king's heir suggested an iron container. Each provincial office was then supplied with one.
Q 15Which gas from coal smoke and volcanoes joins nitrogen oxides as the main cause of acid rain?
Sulfur dioxide
Sulfur dioxide reacts with water in the air to make a strong acid that falls with the rain. Governments in Europe and North America have worked since the 1970s to cut how much is released.
Q 16Which compound, found to seed clouds by novelist Kurt Vonnegut's brother Bernard, is widely used to make rain?
Silver iodide
Silver iodide has a crystal structure like that of ice, so water freezes onto it and grows heavy enough to fall. Bernard Vonnegut made the discovery at General Electric in 1946.
Q 17Which towering cloud, nicknamed the thunderhead, brings the heaviest rain and can flatten into an anvil at the top?
Cumulonimbus
Cumulonimbus clouds can also throw out hail, lightning and tornadoes. The flat anvil forms where the rising air stops climbing, near the top of the weather layer of the atmosphere.
Q 18The word monsoon reached English through Portuguese from a term for a time of year in which language?
Arabic
Arabic mawsim simply means season. The word came to describe winds that reverse direction through the year, bringing a wet phase and then a dry one.
Q 19Which word do forecasters use for light rain whose drops are smaller than half a millimetre across?
Drizzle
Drizzle is so fine that a full day of it may leave only about a millimetre of water on the ground.
Q 20On Saturn's moon Titan, rain falls through thick orange haze as liquid drops of which hydrocarbon?
Methane
Methane plays the part on Titan that water plays on Earth, feeding streams, lakes and seas. The Huygens probe found the evidence after touching down in 2005.
Tlaloc had the left-hand shrine of the twin temples. He was feared as well as honoured, since he commanded hail, thunder and lightning along with the showers that fed the crops.
Q 24Which Maya god was said to bring rain by striking the clouds with a lightning axe?
Chaac
Chaac is both one god and many. Yucatec Maya farmers still tell apart a whole ranked company of rain deities, each tied to a different kind of cloud and shower.
Q 25Which philanthropist was jeered by London's hackney coachmen as reputedly the first man there to carry an umbrella?
Jonas Hanway
Jonas Hanway lived to see the habit catch on, though London's women had carried umbrellas for decades before him. He was also a noted campaigner against tea drinking.
Q 26Which inventor gave his name to the raincoat made by gluing layers of cloth together with dissolved rubber?
Charles Macintosh
Charles Macintosh, a Scottish chemist, dissolved the rubber in naphtha distilled from coal tar. The coat picked up an extra letter along the way: Mackintosh is now the standard spelling.
Q 27Which musician's album Purple Rain spent 24 straight weeks at number one in the United States?
Prince
Prince also starred in the film of the same name, which won an Academy Award for its music. Much of the story plays out at First Avenue, a real Minneapolis nightclub.
Q 28Which composer wrote Raindrops Keep Fallin' on My Head with lyricist Hal David for a 1969 Western?
Burt Bacharach
Burt Bacharach won two Oscars for Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, one for the song and one for the score. Ray Stevens was offered the vocal first and turned it down.
Q 29Which singer scored a 2007 hit with Umbrella, a song first written with Britney Spears in mind?
Rihanna
Rihanna's single ruled the UK chart during a spell of prolonged rain and flooding. Her mentor and label boss Jay-Z guests on the track.
Q 30Which band's Have You Ever Seen the Rain did John Fogerty write about tensions among its members?
Creedence Clearwater Revival
Creedence Clearwater Revival was about to lose Tom Fogerty, John's brother, when the single came out. It was taken from the album Pendulum.