Sixth Grade Trivia Questions
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50 free Sixth Grade trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
49 free sixth grade trivia questions with answers. These sixth grade trivia questions follow the topics most 6th graders actually study: ancient Mesopotamia, Egypt, Greece, Rome and China; the layers of the Earth, plate tectonics and the water cycle; cells and photosynthesis; ratios, percentages, primes and the order of operations; world geography; the basics of the US Constitution; parts of speech and figurative language; and the novels on the class reading list, from Percy Jackson to Hatchet. They are pitched at 11 and 12 year olds, so most are answerable by a curious sixth grader and the rest make good teachable stumpers. Teachers can use them for a Friday review game, and families for a car-ride quiz where the kids finally beat the grown-ups. Every answer was checked against encyclopaedia and primary sources before publishing, so the answer key is safe to read straight to the class.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01The name Mesopotamia means the land 'between' what?
Two rivers
Two rivers: the Tigris and the Euphrates. Little rain falls on the plain between them, so its farmers dug canals to water their fields, and the harvests fed some of the world's first cities.
Q 02Which ancient people developed cuneiform, one of the world's first writing systems?
The Sumerians
The Sumerians first pressed marks into wet clay to keep count of goods such as grain and sheep, and those tallies grew into a script that could carry letters, hymns and epics.
Q 03The Code of Hammurabi, one of the oldest written law codes, comes from which region?
Ancient Mesopotamia
Ancient Mesopotamia. The Babylonian king's code laid down 'an eye for an eye', but only between equals: a man who blinded someone of lower rank paid a fine instead.
Q 04The Rosetta Stone carries the same decree in three scripts: hieroglyphs, Demotic and which language?
Ancient Greek
Ancient Greek. Scholars could still read it, so the Greek text became the crib that let Jean-François Champollion work out the hieroglyphs in 1822.
Q 05The Great Pyramid of Giza was built as a tomb for which pharaoh, also known as Cheops?
Khufu
Khufu's tomb was built not by slaves, as the ancient Greeks later believed, but by thousands of Egyptian labourers working for their king.
Q 06Which Greek city-state is credited with founding the world's first democracy?
Athens
Athens let every male citizen vote on its laws in person at an open-air assembly, but women, slaves and foreign residents had no say.
Q 07The Parthenon, the great temple on the Acropolis, was dedicated to which goddess?
Athena
Athena. Her temple later served as a church and then a mosque, and was blown apart in 1687 when a Venetian shell hit the gunpowder that Ottoman troops had stored inside.
Q 08The ancient Olympic Games were held every four years at Olympia in honour of which god?
Zeus
Zeus. Before each festival a sacred truce was proclaimed, so that athletes and spectators could travel to Olympia and home again in safety.
Q 09Julius Caesar was assassinated in 44 BC on a date known as what?
The Ides of March
The Ides of March was the Roman name for 15 March. The senators who stabbed Caesar hoped to save the Republic, but the wars that followed left his heir Octavian as Rome's first emperor.
Q 10According to legend, which twins founded Rome in 753 BC?
Romulus and Remus
Romulus and Remus, the story goes, were left to die by the Tiber, suckled by a she-wolf and raised by a shepherd; in the best-known telling Romulus later killed his brother and named the city for himself.
Q 11Which dynasty built the brick-and-stone stretches of the Great Wall of China that visitors walk today?
The Ming
The Ming. Earlier walls were mostly pounded earth and little of them survives; the Ming rebuilt the frontier in brick and stone and studded it with watchtowers.
Q 12The Terracotta Army was discovered in 1974 by farmers doing what?
Digging a well
Digging a well, they broke into a pit holding some of the more than 8,000 clay soldiers buried to guard the first emperor, Qin Shi Huang, in the afterlife.
Q 13Which layer of the Earth is the thickest?
The mantle
The mantle is about 2,900 km thick and fills most of the planet's volume; it is almost entirely solid rock, yet over millions of years it flows like a very thick liquid.
Q 21Why do most plant leaves look green?
Chlorophyll reflects that light
Chlorophyll reflects that light: the pigment soaks up red and blue light to power the plant and bounces most of the green back, so leaves show the colour they use least.
Q 22Which part of the cell holds the chromosomes and DNA?
The nucleus
The nucleus is the cell's control room, yet human red blood cells manage without one: they push theirs out as they mature, leaving more room to carry oxygen.
Q 23Which two structures do plant cells have that animal cells lack?
A cell wall and chloroplasts
Q 14Earth's inner core is a solid ball made mostly of iron and which other metal?
Nickel
Nickel. Immense pressure keeps the inner core solid, while the liquid outer core around it swirls as the planet spins and generates Earth's magnetic field.
Q 15Which scientist proposed the idea of continental drift in 1912?
Alfred Wegener
Alfred Wegener was a meteorologist, and leading geologists dismissed him as an outsider; his idea won acceptance only decades after his death, reborn as plate tectonics.
Q 16What name is given to the belt where most of the world's volcanoes and earthquakes occur?
The Ring of Fire
The Ring of Fire rims the Pacific Ocean, where sea-floor plates slide beneath their neighbours and melt, feeding volcanoes from New Zealand round to the tip of South America.
Q 17In the water cycle, what is the name for water vapour turning back into liquid droplets to form clouds?
Condensation
Condensation happens when rising air cools and its water vapour gathers on tiny specks of dust or salt; the same process beads water on a cold glass on a humid day.
Q 18Which glassy, usually black rock forms when lava cools too quickly for crystals to grow?
Obsidian
Obsidian is volcanic glass, and it breaks into edges so sharp that Stone Age people made blades and arrowheads from it.
Q 19Marble forms when heat and pressure transform which rock, itself built largely from seashells and coral?
Limestone
Limestone. Under heat and pressure its calcite recrystallises into a mass of interlocking crystals, and stray minerals such as clay or iron oxides become the veins in the marble.
Q 20Which gas do plants take in from the air to carry out photosynthesis?
Carbon dioxide
Carbon dioxide and water are the raw materials: with energy from sunlight the plant turns them into sugar and releases oxygen as a leftover.
A cell wall and chloroplasts. The cellulose wall gives plants their stiffness, all the way up to a tree trunk, and the chloroplasts capture the Sun's energy.
Q 24In a food chain, what are the plants and algae at the very bottom called?
Producers
Producers make their own food from sunlight, and everything above depends on them; only about a tenth of the energy at each level passes up to the next, so chains rarely run past five links.
Q 25Which planet orbits just inside the asteroid belt?
Mars
Mars. The belt beyond it is far emptier than its name suggests: all its asteroids together have less mass than the Moon, and spacecraft have crossed it without incident.
Q 26Which planet has more mass than all the other planets in the Solar System combined?
Jupiter
Jupiter is more than twice as massive as all the other planets put together, yet the Sun dwarfs them all, holding 99.8% of the Solar System's mass.
Q 27Using the order of operations, what is 1 - 2 x 3^4?
-161
-161. The exponent comes first (3^4 = 81), then the multiplication (2 x 81 = 162), then the subtraction (1 - 162); subtracting first instead would give -81.
Q 28In the mnemonic PEMDAS, what does the P stand for?
Parentheses
Parentheses come first because they let the writer overrule the usual order: 1 + 2 x 3 is 7, but (1 + 2) x 3 is 9.
Q 29Which of these numbers is prime?
29
29 has no factors but 1 and itself, while 21 = 3 x 7, 25 = 5 x 5 and 27 = 3 x 9; Euclid proved around 300 BC that the primes never run out.
Q 30The word 'percent' comes from Latin words meaning what?
By a hundred
By a hundred: the Latin is per centum, so 45% means 45 for every hundred, which is why shifting the decimal point two places turns it into 0.45.