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50 free Smoking trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
Tobacco went from a sacred plant of the Americas to the world's leading cause of preventable death in about five centuries, and the story is full of oddities. This quiz covers the sailor jailed by the Inquisition for exhaling smoke, the king who taxed tobacco by 4,000 percent, the colony that used leaf as money, the sultan who banned it, the machine that made cigarettes cheap, and the scientists who finally proved what smoking does. It also takes in the brands and their marketing (Marlboro's London street, Lucky Strike's wartime pack, Joe Camel and Mickey Mouse), the milestone bans from Wellington's Old Government Building to Ireland's pubs, and the numbers behind modern public health: chemicals in smoke, deaths per year, plain packaging and price elasticity. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's articles on tobacco history, individual brands, smoking bans and the health science, so this set is safe to use for a pub quiz, a health class or a history round.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Archaeological finds suggest humans in the Americas began using tobacco roughly how long ago?
12,300 years
Europeans had never encountered the plant until the voyages to the New World.
Q 02Rodrigo de Jerez, a crewman on Columbus's 1492 voyage, was the first European to do what?
Smoke tobacco
Back home in Ayamonte the Inquisition jailed him for it; by his release seven years later the habit had caught on.
Q 03Why did the Spanish Inquisition imprison Rodrigo de Jerez?
Only the Devil could make a man exhale smoke
He was locked up for his 'sinful and infernal' habits.
Q 04Nicotiana and nicotine honour which French ambassador who sent tobacco to Paris in 1559?
Jean Nicot
Botanists were calling the plant Nicotiana by 1570.
Q 05Which English king wrote 'A Counterblaste to Tobacco' in 1604?
James I
He backed up his pamphlet with a 4,000 percent tax increase, then set up a royal monopoly in 1624.
Q 06By how much did James I raise the tax on tobacco in 1604?
4,000%
The tax did little to stop the fashion, and the Crown later profited from a monopoly instead.
Q 07Which Jamestown settler first raised tobacco successfully as a cash crop, in 1612?
John Rolfe
By 1620 the colony was shipping 40,000 pounds of leaf to England, and demand for labour led to the first enslaved Africans arriving in 1619.
Q 08In the Thirteen Colonies, tobacco served as what in trade with Native Americans?
Currency
The crop was so central that Virginia planters paid debts and even taxes in leaf.
Q 09Which Ottoman sultan banned smoking in his empire in 1633?
Murad IV
He was among the first rulers anywhere to attempt a smoking ban.
Q 10One of the world's earliest smoking bans, in 1575, forbade tobacco use in any church in which country?
Mexico
Pope Urban VII followed in 1590 with a ban across all church-owned buildings.
Q 11Portuguese sailors introduced tobacco to which country in 1542?
Japan
Australia's first tobacco smokers were introduced to it by visiting Indonesian fishermen in the early 18th century.
Q 12James Bonsack's 1881 cigarette-rolling machine was how much faster than a human roller?
13 times
It made the mass-market cigarette possible and handed a fortune to James Buchanan Duke.
Q 13Juan Nepomuceno Adorno, who patented the first cigarette machine in 1847, was from where?
Mexico
The word cigarette itself had been coined in France by 1830.
In 1890, James Buchanan Duke and four rivals combined to form which giant firm?
Q 21US smoking rates fell from 42 percent in 1965 to what by 2006?
20.8%
Even so, most smokers who say they want to quit fail: only 3 to 5 percent succeed in a given attempt.
Q 22Roughly how many chemicals does tobacco smoke contain, according to health authorities?
Over 7,000
Sixty-nine of them are known carcinogens and 98 are linked to heart disease.
Q 23According to the WHO, how many deaths a year are caused by tobacco?
8 million
About 1.3 billion people worldwide use tobacco.
Q 24Approximately how many cigarettes are smoked worldwide each year?
The American Tobacco Company
It was later broken up as a monopoly, spawning several of the brands still sold today.
Q 15Cigarette smoking became the dominant form of tobacco use after roughly what year?
1910
Machine production and wartime rations turned the cigarette from a novelty into the norm.
Q 16Which British researcher's 1950 BMJ paper linked smoking to lung cancer?
Richard Doll
The British Doctors Study confirmed the finding in 1954.
Q 17Scientists in which country first identified a link between smoking and lung cancer in the late 1920s?
Germany
That research fed the first anti-tobacco movement, in Nazi Germany.
Q 18On what day of the week was the landmark 1964 US Surgeon General's report on smoking released, and why?
Saturday, to soften the stock market reaction
The committee had reviewed more than 7,000 scientific papers.
Q 19Which US Surgeon General chaired the committee behind the 1964 Smoking and Health report?
Luther Terry
The report led to the Federal Cigarette Labeling and Advertising Act of 1965 and the first pack warnings.
Q 20Starting on 2 January 1971, the US banned cigarette advertising in which media?
Television and radio
Congress had passed the Public Health Cigarette Smoking Act in April 1970.
5.6 trillion
Their butts are the most numerically frequent litter on the planet.
Q 25What is the most numerically common item of litter in the world?
Cigarette butts
Most factory-made cigarettes carry a filter, and that is what gets dropped.
Q 26Which country in 2004 became the first to completely outlaw the growing, production and sale of tobacco?
Bhutan
The tiny Himalayan kingdom later softened the ban.
Q 27Which country was the first to require graphic warnings on cigarette packaging, in 1985?
Iceland
Australia went further in 2012 with plain, logo-free packs.
Q 28Which country introduced the world's first nationwide smoking ban in workplaces and pubs, in 2004?
Ireland
The whole United Kingdom followed by 2007, with England the last region to comply.
Q 29The first building in the world to ban smoking, in 1876, was the Old Government Building in which city?
Wellington
It was a wooden building, which may explain the caution.
Q 30Which US state passed the first law restricting smoking in most public spaces, in 1975?
Minnesota
California's famous bar and restaurant bans came two decades later.