Statistics Trivia
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8correct to beat the crowd
109 free Statistics trivia questions with answers — science & nature quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
46 free Statistics trivia questions with answers. Statistics runs everything from election forecasts to drug trials, and this quiz tests whether you know how it works and where it came from. Forty-six questions cover the basics (mean, median, mode, standard deviation, z-scores), the big ideas (the normal distribution, the central limit theorem, Bayes' theorem, p-values) and the stories behind them: the Guinness brewer who invented the t-test, Florence Nightingale's rose diagrams, Abraham Wald's bullet-riddled bombers and the magazine poll that got 1936 spectacularly wrong. Easy questions ask which letter stands for standard deviation and how many people you need for a shared birthday; hard ones want the Prussian horse-kick data, Anscombe's quartet and the size of Gallup's 1936 sample. Ideal for students, teachers, data people and anyone who enjoyed the Monty Hall argument. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's articles on the concepts and their inventors, and each question carries the sentence that backs it up.
30 of 109 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which fallacy is the belief that a coin is 'due' to land tails after a long run of heads?
The gambler's fallacy
The gambler's fallacy cost roulette players millions at Monte Carlo in 1913, when black came up 26 times running and they kept betting on red; the wheel has no memory, so each spin's odds stay the same.
Q 02Which measure of central tendency is the middle value when data are sorted?
The median
The median is the middle value of sorted data; it resists distortion by a few huge values, which is why median income describes a typical household better than mean income.
Q 03What is the 'mode' of a data set?
The value that appears most often
The value that appears most often is the mode; it is the only one of the three averages that works for categories, so the most common eye colour in a class is a mode.
Q 04Which Greek letter is conventionally used for standard deviation?
Sigma (σ)
Sigma (σ) stands for standard deviation, which is why physicists waited for a 'five-sigma' signal, the level their field demands for a discovery, before announcing the Higgs boson in 2012.
Q 05In a normal distribution, roughly what percentage of values fall within one standard deviation of the mean?
68%
68% of values lie within one standard deviation of the mean, which is why IQ tests, scaled to a mean of 100 and a deviation of 15, put about two-thirds of people between 85 and 115.
Q 06The normal distribution is also named after which mathematician?
Carl Friedrich Gauss
Carl Friedrich Gauss gave the normal distribution its other name, the Gaussian, after using it in 1809 to model measurement errors in astronomy.
Q 07Which theorem explains why averages of large samples follow a bell curve, whatever the shape of the data?
The central limit theorem
The central limit theorem says averages of large samples settle into a bell curve even when the raw data are lopsided, which is why methods built on the normal curve work on data that are far from normal.
Q 08Which law says the average of many independent trials settles at the expected value?
The law of large numbers
The law of large numbers is why casinos win in the long run: a single spin can cost the house money, but over thousands of spins its takings settle at a predictable percentage.
Q 09The t-distribution used for small samples was invented by a statistician working for which company?
Guinness
Guinness employed William Sealy Gosset at its Dublin brewery, where he devised the t-distribution to judge small samples of barley; the firm made him publish under a pseudonym.
Q 10Under what pen name did William Sealy Gosset publish his t-distribution work?
Student
Student was the alias because his employer let its researchers publish only if they hid their own names and the firm's; the 1908 paper gave science Student's t-test, still named for the pen name.
Q 11Who founded the world's first university statistics department, at University College London in 1911?
Karl Pearson
Karl Pearson formed the Department of Applied Statistics by merging the two laboratories he already ran at the college, one for biometrics and one for eugenics, and led it until he retired in 1933.
Q 12Which statistician developed analysis of variance (ANOVA) while analysing crop data at Rothamsted?
Ronald Fisher
Ronald Fisher went to Rothamsted in 1919 on a temporary post to see what could be learned from crop records kept since the 1840s, stayed 14 years, and devised analysis of variance there.
Q 13Which threshold did the man behind ANOVA popularise as 'convenient' for judging statistical significance?
P = 0.05
Q 21Which coiner of the term 'bit' introduced the box-and-whisker plot?
John Tukey
John Tukey's box-and-whisker plot draws a box around the middle half of a data set, so that stray extreme values stand out as lone points beyond the whiskers.
Q 22What is the interquartile range?
The difference between the 75th and 25th percentiles
The difference between the 75th and 25th percentiles is the interquartile range; because it ignores the tails, it is a robust measure of spread unaffected by outliers.
Q 23A z-score tells you how many of what a value lies above or below the mean?
Standard deviations
P = 0.05, or 1 in 20, was the level Statistical Methods for Research Workers called convenient in 1925; it stuck so firmly that 72 researchers jointly urged tightening it to 0.005 in 2017.
Q 14A p-value is the probability of results at least as extreme as those observed, assuming what is true?
The null hypothesis
The null hypothesis is what a p-value assumes: it gives the probability of data at least this extreme if the null were true, which the ASA's 2016 statement stressed is not the probability the hypothesis is true.
Q 15Which cousin of Charles Darwin developed the concept of correlation and promoted 'regression toward the mean'?
Francis Galton
Francis Galton hit on regression through his 1875 sweet-pea breeding experiments and introduced the correlation coefficient in 1888, an idea later formalised by his protégé.
Q 16Regression toward the mean took its name from an 1880s study comparing the heights of whom?
Parents and their children
Parents and their children: tall parents tended to have children nearer the average height, and short parents taller ones, an effect the study named 'regression towards mediocrity'.
Q 17Bayes' theorem became the basis of which email tool in the early 2000s?
The spam filter
The spam filter: a Bayesian filter learns how often each word turns up in junk and in real mail, then updates the odds that a new message is spam, the approach Paul Graham set out in 2002.
Q 18London's Bills of Mortality, the raw data for a founding 1662 study of demography, singled out deaths from which disease?
Plague
Plague deaths had a count of their own in the weekly bills; haberdasher John Graunt mined them in 1662 to build an early life table, the start of demography.
Q 19Which nursing pioneer was also a statistical innovator, famous for her polar area (rose) diagrams?
Florence Nightingale
Florence Nightingale drew her polar area diagrams in 1858 to show that disease, not wounds, killed most British soldiers in the Crimean War.
Q 20William Playfair, inventor of the bar graph, introduced which familiar graphic in 1801?
The pie chart
The pie chart made its debut in Playfair's Statistical Breviary; many statisticians call it a poor way to show data, because the eye judges lengths better than areas, yet it became a staple of business and the media.
Standard deviations: a z-score of 2 means two standard deviations above the mean, which lets results from differently scaled tests, such as the SAT and ACT, be compared directly.
Q 24Whose paradox describes a trend that appears in several groups but reverses when the groups are combined?
Simpson's
Simpson's paradox: the classic example is UC Berkeley's 1973 graduate admissions, which looked biased against women overall but not within individual departments.
Q 25How many people are needed in a room for a better-than-even chance that two share a birthday?
23
With 23 people there are 253 possible pairs, which is why the odds climb so fast.
Q 26In the Monty Hall problem, what should the contestant do after the host reveals a goat?
Switch doors
Switch doors: switching wins the car two-thirds of the time, because the first pick is right only one time in three and the host's reveal moves the remaining odds to the other door.
Q 27Which columnist's 1990 answer to the Monty Hall problem drew thousands of angry letters?
Marilyn vos Savant
Marilyn vos Savant gave her answer in Parade magazine; about 10,000 readers wrote in, most of them to say she was wrong and many signing as PhDs, and she was right.
Q 28According to Benford's law, about how often is 1 the leading digit in real-world numerical data?
30%
30%: Benford's law puts the leading digit 1 at about 30% of entries (log10 2 ≈ 0.301), a pattern Simon Newcomb spotted in worn logarithm tables in 1881.
Q 29Which magazine mailed ten million ballots in 1936 and wrongly predicted Alf Landon would beat FDR?
The Literary Digest
The Literary Digest drew its mailing list from its own readers plus car and telephone owners, a sample skewed to the better-off; fewer than a quarter replied, and the magazine folded within two years.
Q 30Abraham Wald's WWII study of returning bombers is the classic example of correcting for which statistical error?
Survivorship bias
Survivorship bias: as the story is told, Wald reasoned that returning planes showed where hits could be survived, so armour belonged on the spots they came back without damage to.