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80 free Random trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
Random trivia is trivia with no theme, and that is the point. One question is about the coldest capital city on Earth, the next is about a chess piece, then a Beethoven sonata, then a Thai chilli sauce. This set has 75 of them, drawn from geography, history, science, sport, film and TV, music, food and drink, animals, literature, art, technology and pop culture, and shuffled every time you play so no two runs feel the same. They run from easy warm-ups almost anyone can answer to a handful that will make a good pub team argue. Every question has one correct answer, three plausible wrong ones and a short explanation with one extra fact worth remembering. Each was checked against an encyclopaedia or primary source before publishing, and every question shows its source. Play the whole set solo, pull ten for a quiz night round, or use it to settle a family argument about who actually knows the most random stuff.
30 of 80 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which planet is nicknamed the Red Planet?
Mars
Mars is the Red Planet: iron oxide, essentially rust, in the dust covering its surface gives it the reddish colour visible from Earth.
Q 02How many points is a touchdown worth in American football?
6
It has been six since 1912; the extra point or two-point conversion is what pushes a score to seven or eight.
Q 03What is the main ingredient of hummus?
Chickpeas
The word itself is simply Arabic for chickpeas; tahini, lemon juice and garlic do the rest.
Q 04Which fictional paper company employs the staff of the US version of The Office?
Dunder Mifflin
Dunder Mifflin Paper Company's Scranton, Pennsylvania branch is the setting, run by regional manager Michael Scott from the show's 2005 premiere.
Q 05Which superhero's secret identity is Peter Parker?
Spider-Man
Spider-Man is Peter Parker, bitten by a radioactive spider in Amazing Fantasy #15 (1962), created by Stan Lee and Steve Ditko.
Q 06Who wrote The Hobbit?
J. R. R. Tolkien
J. R. R. Tolkien published The Hobbit in 1937 and later revised the Gollum chapter so it sat comfortably alongside The Lord of the Rings.
Q 07What is the name of Batman's butler?
Alfred
Alfred Pennyworth first appeared in Batman #16 in 1943 and has since served as Bruce Wayne's legal guardian, medic and surrogate father.
Q 08Which capital city is the coldest in the world by average yearly temperature?
Ulaanbaatar
Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia's capital, averages roughly -1 C across the year; it sits at about 1,350 metres in a valley that traps bitterly cold winter air.
Q 09On which planet are the strongest sustained winds in the Solar System, reaching around 2,100 km/h?
Neptune
Neptune's winds reach about 2,100 km/h, the fastest known on any planet, driven partly by internal heat although it gets only about 40 percent of Uranus's sunlight.
Q 10What is the only Spanish-speaking country in Africa?
Equatorial Guinea
Equatorial Guinea, the former colony of Spanish Guinea, became independent in 1968 and keeps Spanish as an official language alongside French and Portuguese.
Q 11Which was the first film to win the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature?
Shrek
Shrek, the 2001 DreamWorks film, won the inaugural Best Animated Feature Oscar at the March 2002 ceremony, beating Monsters, Inc. and Jimmy Neutron: Boy Genius.
Q 12Which element has the symbol W, taken from its German name Wolfram?
Tungsten
Tungsten, symbol W from the German Wolfram, has the highest melting point of any metal, about 3,422 C, which made it ideal for incandescent bulb filaments.
Q 13In which city were Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sophie assassinated in June 1914?
Sarajevo
Sarajevo, capital of Austro-Hungarian-ruled Bosnia, was where Gavrilo Princip, a Bosnian Serb student, shot the couple on 28 June 1914, setting off the July Crisis.
Q 21How many chromosomes does a typical human body cell contain?
46
46 chromosomes: 22 pairs of autosomes plus one pair of sex chromosomes; egg and sperm cells carry a single set of 23.
Q 22Which explosive, invented by Alfred Nobel in 1867, made the founder of the Nobel Prizes his fortune?
Dynamite
Dynamite tamed nitroglycerin into a form easier and safer to handle, making Nobel hugely rich.
Q 23Which team became the first to win 18 NBA championships, in 2024?
Boston Celtics
The Boston Celtics' 2024 title was their 18th, the first time any team reached that many; eight of them came in a row from 1959 to 1966, the longest streak in league history.
Q 14Which chilli sauce takes its name from a coastal town in Thailand?
Sriracha
Sriracha is named after Si Racha, a town on Thailand's eastern Gulf coast in Chonburi province; the best-known American version is made by Huy Fong Foods, founded in Los Angeles in 1980.
Q 15What is the term for a group of owls?
A parliament
A parliament of owls: the term was popularised by C. S. Lewis, whose 1953 Narnia book The Silver Chair features a parliament of owls, echoing Chaucer's poem The Parliament of Fowls.
Q 16Which programming language is named after a British comedy troupe?
Python
Python was named by Guido van Rossum after Monty Python's Flying Circus; its documentation carries on the joke, using 'spam' and 'eggs' as placeholder names instead of 'foo' and 'bar'.
Q 17Which island is the largest in the Mediterranean Sea, and also its most populous?
Sicily
Sicily, with over 4.7 million people and Europe's largest active volcano, Etna, is both the largest and most populous island in the Mediterranean.
Q 18Who was the first person to lead a party to the South Pole, arriving on 14 December 1911?
Roald Amundsen
Roald Amundsen reached the Pole on 14 December 1911, five weeks ahead of Scott; he had learned polar survival skills from the Netsilik Inuit while navigating the Northwest Passage in 1903-06.
Q 19Which Grand Slam tournament is played on clay courts?
French Open
The French Open at Roland Garros in Paris is the only major on clay; its long rallies make it widely regarded as the most physically demanding tournament in tennis.
Q 20What is the best-selling album of all time, with an estimated 70 million copies sold?
Thriller
Thriller, Michael Jackson's 1982 album, has sold an estimated 70 million copies; sales surged after he debuted the moonwalk on the Motown 25 TV special in May 1983.
Q 24Which post-impressionist painter severed part of his own left ear with a razor in December 1888?
Vincent van Gogh
Vincent van Gogh cut off part of his left ear after a quarrel with Paul Gauguin in Arles; he died in July 1890, only 19 months later, aged 37.
Q 25Besides Vienna, Bratislava and Budapest, which fourth national capital does the Danube flow through?
Belgrade
Belgrade, the Serbian capital, stands where the Sava meets the Danube; downstream the river forms much of the Romania-Bulgaria border before reaching the Black Sea.
Q 26Which Levantine or Turkish dessert is made from layers of filo pastry, chopped nuts and syrup or honey?
Baklava
Baklava's paper-thin filo sheets are brushed with melted butter before baking, giving the crisp layered texture beneath the chopped nuts and syrup.
Q 27What is the highest possible break in a normal frame of snooker?
147
147 comes from potting all 15 reds each with a black, then the six colours in order; only with a free ball can the theoretical maximum rise to 155.
Q 28Which is the tallest and heaviest of all living penguin species?
Emperor
The emperor penguin stands up to about 120 cm and breeds only in Antarctica, where males incubate a single egg on their feet through the polar winter.
Q 29Which Canadian author wrote the 1985 dystopian novel The Handmaid's Tale?
Margaret Atwood
Margaret Atwood published The Handmaid's Tale in 1985; she has said every practice in Gilead had a real historical precedent, and the novel won the first Arthur C. Clarke Award in 1987.
Q 30Which sultan's 46-year reign, from 1520 to 1566, was the longest of any Ottoman ruler?
Suleiman the Magnificent
Suleiman the Magnificent ruled from 1520 to 1566; under him the Ottomans took Belgrade in 1521 and Rhodes in 1522 and besieged Vienna in 1529.