Summer
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179 free Summer trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
89 free summer trivia questions with answers. These summer trivia questions and answers cover the whole season, not just the beach. There is astronomy (why the solstice is the longest day, why the dog days are named after a star, why Earth is actually farthest from the Sun in July), summer holidays from the Fourth of July and Bastille Day to Midsummer in Sweden and Obon in Japan, summer food (the ice cream cone, the Popsicle, pink lemonade, s'mores), summer sports from Wimbledon to the Tour de France, and the songs and films that defined summers past. About a third of the questions are easy enough for a family barbecue or a classroom, a third are medium, and the rest will stretch a pub-quiz regular. Kids can play too: nothing here is violent or adult. Every answer has been checked against a primary or encyclopaedic source, and each question links to the page that confirms it, so you can settle arguments on the spot.
30 of 179 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which three whole calendar months make up meteorological summer in the Northern Hemisphere?
June, July and August
June, July and August make up meteorological summer because whole months keep the records tidy; astronomical summer, from the solstice to the equinox, starts about three weeks later.
Q 02Which three months make up summer in Australia?
December, January and February
December, January and February are Australia's summer because its weather bureau counts the seasons in whole calendar months, so summer begins on 1 December rather than at the solstice.
Q 03The Northern Hemisphere summer solstice, the longest day of the year, usually falls on which two June dates?
The 20th or 21st
The 20th or 21st catches it almost every year, because the calendar and the tropical year do not match exactly; the solstice can land on the 22nd only very rarely.
Q 04The Romans' summer solstice date became the feast of which saint, born six months before Jesus?
John the Baptist
John the Baptist's feast falls on 24 June, the old Roman solstice date, because Luke's Gospel makes him six months older than Jesus, whose birth the church kept on the Roman winter solstice, 25 December.
Q 05The 'dog days' of summer are named after the heliacal rising of which star?
Sirius
Sirius, the Dog Star in Canis Major, returned to the dawn sky in the hottest weeks of the Roman year, so the Romans blamed it for the heat and lethargy and called the period dies caniculares.
Q 06On the June solstice, the noon Sun stands directly overhead along which line of latitude?
Tropic of Cancer
The Tropic of Cancer was named in antiquity, when the Sun stood in the constellation Cancer at the June solstice; Earth's slow wobble has since carried the solstice Sun out of Cancer altogether.
Q 07What is the point in Earth's orbit, reached each July, where the planet is farthest from the Sun?
Aphelion
Aphelion comes in early July, about two weeks after the June solstice, when Earth is some 5 million km farther from the Sun than in January, which is why distance cannot explain the seasons.
Q 08The midnight sun, when the Sun never sets in summer, can be seen north of which line of latitude?
The Arctic Circle
The Arctic Circle, at about 66.5 degrees north, is the edge, and the effect grows the farther north you go: in Svalbard, Norway, the Sun does not set from late April to late August.
Q 09Debris from comet Swift–Tuttle causes which meteor shower, seen every August?
The Perseids
The Perseids are named for the constellation Perseus, the point in the sky they seem to streak from; the comet that sheds them takes 133 years to orbit the Sun, yet Earth crosses its trail every August.
Q 10The Atlantic hurricane season lasts half the year and reaches its peak in which month?
September
September is the peak, around the 10th: by then a whole summer of sun has warmed the tropical ocean, and the wind shear that tears young storms apart has died away.
Q 11The highest air temperature ever recorded, 134 °F, was measured in 1913 at Furnace Creek in which place?
Death Valley, California
Death Valley, California, only got the record back in 2012, when the World Meteorological Organization threw out a 1922 reading of 136 °F from El Azizia, Libya, as unreliable.
Q 12Which year is the 'Year Without a Summer', when snow fell in New England in June after a volcanic eruption?
1816
1816 was the Year Without a Summer: ash from Tambora's eruption chilled the globe, and the wet, gloomy weather kept Mary Shelley indoors at Lake Geneva, where she began writing Frankenstein.
Q 13Which country first adopted daylight saving time nationally in 1916?
Germany
Q 21Which author's writing helped make Pamplona's running of the bulls famous worldwide?
Ernest Hemingway
Ernest Hemingway turned his own 1925 trip to the fiesta into The Sun Also Rises, basing its characters on the friends he travelled with; Pamplona later put up a monument to him outside its bullring.
Q 22Burning Man began on Baker Beach before moving to the Black Rock Desert in which state?
Nevada
Nevada's Black Rock Desert took over in 1990, after park police refused to let the wooden figure burn on Baker Beach, where Larry Harvey and Jerry James had first lit one on the 1986 summer solstice.
Q 23Which holiday, first celebrated with a New York parade in 1882, became the unofficial end of the American summer?
Labor Day
Germany and its ally Austria-Hungary put their clocks forward on 30 April 1916 to save fuel for the war effort; within weeks their enemies, the United Kingdom and France among them, had done the same.
Q 14Juhannus, when 'kokko' fires are lit beside lakes through the nightless night, is which country's Midsummer festival?
Finland
Finland's Juhannus was once Ukon juhla, the feast of the sky god Ukko, until the church gave it a saint's name; many Finns still leave town for lakeside cottages, where the Sun barely sets.
Q 15Which Founding Father predicted Americans would forever celebrate 2 July, the day Congress voted for independence?
John Adams
John Adams wrote to his wife Abigail that 2 July would be marked for ever with 'Pomp and Parade'; instead Americans chose the 4th, the date on the Declaration that Congress adopted two days later.
Q 16Which two Founding Fathers both died on 4 July 1826, the Declaration's 50th anniversary?
John Adams and Thomas Jefferson
John Adams and Thomas Jefferson died hours apart: Adams's family recalled his last words as 'Thomas Jefferson survives', not knowing Jefferson had died at Monticello earlier that day.
Q 17The Nathan's Famous hot dog eating contest is held in which New York neighbourhood?
Coney Island
Coney Island's contest is held each 4 July outside the original Nathan's stand; its famous origin story, a 1916 eating duel between immigrants over who was most patriotic, was invented by a publicist in the 1970s.
Q 18France's Bastille Day military parade marches down which famous avenue each 14 July?
Champs-Élysées
The Champs-Élysées has hosted the parade since the First World War, yet the fortress whose fall the day recalls was nearly empty: the Bastille held just seven prisoners when it was stormed in 1789.
Q 19Obon, a mid-August festival when families welcome their ancestors' spirits home, is celebrated in which country?
Japan
Japan's Obon ends with floating lanterns set on rivers, lakes and the sea to guide the spirits back to their world, after days of grave visits and bon odori dances.
Q 20La Tomatina, the tomato-throwing festival held in Buñol each August, takes place in which country?
Spain
Spain's Buñol, near Valencia, trucks in well over 100 tonnes of tomatoes; the fight is said to have begun in 1945, when a scuffle at a parade of giant-headed figures spilled onto a market vegetable stall.
Labor Day began as a Central Labor Union parade through New York in 1882; states took it up one by one, and President Grover Cleveland signed it into national law in 1894.
Q 24Which city's 1904 World's Fair made the ice cream cone famous, by legend when a vendor ran out of dishes?
St. Louis
St. Louis's fair made the cone famous: in the best-known telling, Syrian concessionaire Ernest Hamwi rolled one of his waffle pastries into a cone for the ice cream seller next door, who had run out of dishes.
Q 25Frank Epperson first sold his accidental frozen invention as the 'Epsicle'; by which name did it become famous?
Popsicle
The Popsicle got its name, the story goes, when Epperson's children kept calling it 'Pop's sicle'; he was 11 when he left a cup of soda powder and water with a stirring stick outside on a freezing night in 1905.
Q 26The watermelon belongs to the same plant family as which of these?
Cucumber
Cucumber, pumpkin and watermelon all belong to the gourd family; to a botanist the watermelon is a berry, of the thick-rinded kind called a pepo.
Q 27Genome studies trace the watermelon's wild ancestors to which continent?
Africa
Africa is home: a 2021 genome study found the watermelon's closest wild relative is Sudan's Kordofan melon, overturning the prevailing view that the fruit's roots lay in South Africa.
Q 28Which city chartered a lemonade sellers' guild in 1676, its vendors carrying tanks on their backs?
Paris
Paris gave its Compagnie de Limonadiers a monopoly in 1676; one of the city's limonadiers, Procopio, went on to add coffee to the ices and lemonade he sold and opened the Café Procope.
Q 29Which organisation's 1927 camping handbook printed one of the first known recipes for s'mores?
The Girl Scouts
The Girl Scouts' guide Tramping and Trailing with the Girl Scouts called the treat 'Some Mores'; the name, a plea for seconds, had been squeezed into 's'more' by the 1930s.
Q 30Which company bought the rights to the flying disc in 1957 and later branded it the Frisbee?
Wham-O
Wham-O bought Fred Morrison's Pluto Platter in 1957 and renamed it the Frisbee, after the Frisbie bakery whose empty pie tins college students had been tossing around for years.