South Korea Trivia
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This South Korea trivia quiz has 98 free questions with answers and covers the country from the Three Kingdoms and Sejong the Great's alphabet to the Korean War, the DMZ, the Miracle on the Han River, the 1988 Seoul Olympics, the 2002 World Cup semi-final and the Korean Wave that gave the world Gangnam Style, BTS, Parasite and Squid Game. It also takes in the food (kimchi, bulgogi, soju, banchan and metal chopsticks), the flag, the national flower, Jeju Island, Hallasan, the chaebol, conscription, the world's lowest fertility rate and the martial-law drama of 2024. The easy questions are ones most people know (the capital, the peninsula's northern neighbour, the martial art that became an Olympic sport). The medium ones ask about Hangul, the armistice, the flag's trigrams and the country's biggest companies. The hard ones want the width of the DMZ, the year Korean age was abolished, the dynasty that gave Korea its name and the admiral behind the turtle ships. Every answer has been checked against a reference encyclopaedia, and each question shows its explanation and citation once you have answered.
30 of 98 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01What is South Korea's official name?
Republic of Korea
Republic of Korea: the name is older than the state, first used by the provisional government that independence activists set up in exile in Shanghai in 1919.
Q 02Roughly what share of South Korea's 52 million people live in the Seoul metropolitan area?
A half
About half of South Koreans, roughly 26 million of 52 million, live in the Seoul Capital Area of Seoul, Incheon and Gyeonggi Province, one of the most populous metropolitan regions on Earth.
Q 03The name "Korea" derives from which historical kingdom?
Goryeo
Goryeo ruled from 918 to 1392 and gave English the word, yet it is a name only outsiders use: South Koreans call their country Hanguk.
Q 04Which three kingdoms shared Korea in the Three Kingdoms period, which ended when Silla conquered the other two?
Goguryeo, Baekje and Silla
Goguryeo, Baekje and Silla shared the peninsula for centuries; Silla allied with Tang China to take Baekje in 660 and Goguryeo in 668, then drove the Tang armies out.
Q 05What ended the Korean Empire in 1910?
Japanese annexation
Japanese annexation: a treaty signed in August 1910 ended the empire after only 13 years and opened 35 years of colonial rule, which lasted until 1945.
Q 06Which king had Hangul, Korea's own script, created to promote literacy among ordinary people?
Sejong the Great
Sejong the Great published the script in 1446 over the objections of court scholars: Choe Manri and other Confucian officials had petitioned him against it in 1444.
Q 07South Korea's public holiday on 9 October celebrates the creation of what?
The Korean alphabet
The Korean alphabet: Hangul Day marks the script's publication in 1446. It became a day off in 1949, lost that status after 1990 and won it back in 2013.
Q 08Which admiral's "turtle ships" helped halt the Japanese invasions of Korea in the 1590s?
Yi Sun-sin
Yi Sun-sin's fleet cut Japan's supply lines by sea; stripped of command and tortured in 1597, he was recalled after his replacement lost almost the whole navy at Chilcheollyang.
Q 09In which year was the southern zone of the peninsula established as an independent state?
1948
The Republic of Korea was proclaimed on 15 August 1948, three months after a UN-supervised National Assembly election in the south; the North declared its own state on 9 September 1948.
Q 10The Korean War ended in 1953 with what?
An armistice
Fighting ended with an armistice signed at Panmunjom on 27 July 1953; no peace treaty followed, so the two Koreas remained formally at war for decades afterward.
Q 11How wide is the Korean Demilitarized Zone that separates North and South?
About 4 km
About 4 km wide: each army pulled back 2 km from the 1953 front line, and decades with almost no people have turned the strip into a haven for cranes and other wildlife.
Q 12The DMZ intersects which line of latitude?
The 38th parallel
The 38th parallel was the dividing line of 1945, but the DMZ follows the 1953 front line instead, so it crosses the parallel at an angle: south of it in the west, north of it in the east.
Q 13Which general seized power in South Korea's 1961 coup?
Park Chung Hee
Park Chung Hee ruled for 18 years, until the director of his own intelligence agency, Kim Jae-gyu, shot him during a dinner in October 1979.
Q 21What is the Gangnam in Psy's "Gangnam Style"?
A Seoul district
A Seoul district: Gangnam is known for its concentrated wealth and showy spending, and Psy said the song pokes fun at posers who try hard to look as if they belong there.
Q 22A member of K-pop pioneers Seo Taiji and Boys founded which label?
YG Entertainment
YG Entertainment: Yang Hyun-suk set it up after the trio split. At their 1992 TV debut the judges gave 'Nan Arayo' the lowest score of the night, yet the song went on to top the charts for 17 weeks.
Q 23In 2020 BTS became the first all-South Korean act to top the Billboard Hot 100 with which single?
Dynamite
Q 14South Korea's rapid post-war economic transformation is known by what nickname?
The Miracle on the Han River
The Miracle on the Han River, named for the river through Seoul, took the country from aid recipient to aid donor: in 2010 it joined the OECD's committee of donor nations.
Q 15The mass protests of 1987 that won South Koreans direct presidential elections are known as what?
The June Democratic Struggle
The June Democratic Struggle swelled after a student activist, Park Jong-chul, died under police torture; within weeks the regime agreed to direct elections.
Q 16Which South Korean president won the 2000 Nobel Peace Prize for his "Sunshine Policy" towards the North?
Kim Dae-jung
Kim Dae-jung, president from 1998 to 2003, won the 2000 Nobel Peace Prize after his Sunshine Policy produced the first inter-Korean summit, with Kim Jong Il in Pyongyang in June 2000.
Q 17At the 2002 FIFA World Cup, co-hosted with Japan, how far did South Korea get?
The semi-finals
The semi-finals: Ahn Jung-hwan's golden goal knocked out Italy, whereupon the president of his Italian club, Perugia, said he would never play for it again; Germany ended the run 1-0.
Q 18Which South Korean county hosted the 2018 Winter Olympics?
Pyeongchang
Pyeongchang won the Games on its third bid, and organisers styled the name 'PyeongChang', with a capital C, to head off confusion with Pyongyang, the North's capital.
Q 19Which martial art became an official Olympic medal sport at the Sydney 2000 Games?
Taekwondo
Taekwondo got its name only in 1955, when General Choi Hong-hi helped unite Korea's rival schools; it was first shown at the Olympics as a demonstration sport in Seoul in 1988.
Q 20Which game's televised pro leagues turned South Korea into an esports powerhouse in the early 2000s?
StarCraft
StarCraft, released by Blizzard in 1998, was broadcast on dedicated Korean cable channels such as OnGameNet, and pro players like Lim Yo-hwan became national celebrities.
Dynamite was the first song BTS recorded entirely in English, released in August 2020 to lift spirits during the pandemic; it entered the Hot 100 at No. 1.
Q 24What does the name BTS, Bangtan Sonyeondan, literally mean?
Bulletproof Boy Scouts
Bulletproof Boy Scouts: member J-Hope has said the name is about blocking the stereotypes and criticism aimed at young people like bullets; the English reading Beyond the Scene came in 2017.
Q 25Bong Joon-ho's Parasite made Oscar history in 2020 as the first what?
Non-English-language film to win Best Picture
Non-English-language film to win Best Picture: only a few years earlier, a government blacklist had cut its director and thousands of other artists off from state funding.
Q 26In Squid Game, 456 players risk their lives playing what?
Children's games
Children's games: Hwang Dong-hyuk wrote the story in 2009 while short of money himself, and no studio would fund it for a decade until Netflix stepped in.
Q 27The global boom in South Korean music, dramas and film is known by what name?
Hallyu
Hallyu means 'Korean wave', and the label is not home-grown: it took hold in China in the late 1990s, when Korean TV dramas and pop first won big audiences there.
Q 28Many South Korean homes have a second refrigerator built specially to store which food?
Kimchi
Kimchi: winter batches were traditionally buried in earthenware jars to stay cool without freezing, and the dedicated fridge holds the steady low temperature that slow fermentation needs.
Q 29Unlike most of their East Asian neighbours, Koreans traditionally eat with chopsticks made of what?
Metal
Metal chopsticks, today usually stainless steel, come paired with a long-handled spoon in a set called sujeo; the custom is believed to stem from royal silver chopsticks used to detect poison.
Q 30The name of the grilled dish bulgogi literally means what?
Fire meat
Fire meat: bul is 'fire' and gogi is 'meat'. The marinated beef is grilled, then often eaten wrapped in a lettuce leaf with the side dishes.