Supply Chain Trivia
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100 free Supply Chain trivia questions with answers — technology quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
42 free supply chain trivia questions with answers. Everything you own arrived by supply chain, and this quiz is about how. Forty-two questions cover the invention of the shipping container and the first voyage of the Ideal-X, why a twenty-foot container is not quite twenty feet, the Suez and Panama canals, the six days the Ever Given blocked world trade, and the origins of just-in-time, kanban and the Toyota Production System. There are questions on the first barcode ever scanned, the size of a standard pallet, the beer game and the bullwhip effect, Incoterms, bills of lading, FedEx's term-paper origin story, Maersk, the Port of Shanghai and where the words 'logistics' and 'supply chain' come from. It works for a team-building session, a logistics class or anyone who has ever wondered how a pack of gum gets to a shelf. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's articles on the topics, and each question carries the sentence that supports it.
30 of 100 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which fashion chain is famed for taking designs from sketch to shop in as little as two weeks?
Zara
Zara sends its clothes through its distribution centres in Spain and ships to stores twice a week in small batches, so a look that sells can be restocked while it is still in fashion.
Q 02In April 1956 the converted tanker Ideal X made a pioneering container voyage from Newark to which port?
Houston
Houston had 58 trucks waiting, one for each container on board; the voyage was the idea of Malcom McLean, a North Carolina trucker turned shipowner.
Q 03McLean's container line, originally Pan-Atlantic Steamship, was renamed what in 1960?
Sea-Land Service
Sea-Land Service made Malcom McLean rich: R.J. Reynolds, the tobacco firm whose cigarettes his trucks once hauled, bought it in 1969 and he made $160 million.
Q 04Which engineer, hired by Malcom McLean, designed the twistlock and corner castings that lock shipping containers together?
Keith Tantlinger
Keith Tantlinger developed the twistlock in Spokane in the 1950s, and his corner fittings became an ISO standard, so any crane, truck or ship in the world can grip any box.
Q 05Container ship capacity is measured in TEU, in which the T stands for what?
Twenty-foot
Twenty-foot: the unit counts every box as if it were 20 feet long, so a standard 40-foot container counts as two and a ship's capacity can be given as a single number.
Q 06Why is the smaller standard shipping container an inch and a half shorter than its nominal length?
So two fit under one 40-footer
So two fit under one 40-footer: twistlocks hold a pair of the shorter boxes 3 inches apart, and trimming each one makes the pair exactly as long as the big box stacked on top.
Q 07Most shipping containers are made of which steel, prized by sculptors for its orange-brown skin?
Corten steel
Corten steel, also called weathering steel, forms a stable layer of rust that shields the metal beneath and slows further corrosion.
Q 08In March 2021 the container ship Ever Given blocked which waterway for six days?
The Suez Canal
The Suez Canal was shut for six days; Egypt then impounded the ship for three months while demanding a reported $916 million, including $300 million for 'loss of reputation'.
Q 09In 2021 the Ever Given flew Panama's flag for a Taiwanese line, but its owner was from which country?
Japan
Japan's Shoei Kisen owns the ship, so the compensation claim after it ran aground fell on the Japanese owner and its insurers, not on the Taiwanese line that chartered it.
Q 10What finally helped free the container ship stuck for six days in 2021?
A spring tide
A spring tide under a full moon lifted the hull while tugs pulled and dredgers sucked sand from around the bow.
Q 11Which Frenchman built Egypt's great canal, then failed in Panama?
De Lesseps
De Lesseps was a diplomat, not an engineer; his sea-level plan for Panama collapsed amid malaria, yellow fever and financial ruin.
Q 12Which Egyptian leader nationalised his country's main canal in July 1956, triggering an international crisis?
Gamal Abdel Nasser
Gamal Abdel Nasser seized the British- and French-owned canal company on 26 July, a week after Washington withdrew its offer to help pay for the Aswan High Dam.
Q 13The locks of the Panama Canal lift ships 26 metres up to which artificial body of water?
Gatun Lake
Gatun Lake was the largest artificial lake in the world when the Chagres River was dammed in 1913; ships sail across it, which spared the builders a vast amount of digging.
Q 21Which 1961 book by Jay Forrester first described the bullwhip effect, also known as the Forrester effect?
Industrial Dynamics
Industrial Dynamics grew out of a puzzle at General Electric, where an appliance plant lurched between hiring sprees and layoffs; Forrester showed the firm's own rules, not the market, were to blame.
Q 22The 'beer game', a classroom simulation of supply chain coordination, was invented at which university?
MIT
MIT's Jay Forrester invented it at the Sloan School in 1960; players see only the orders passed to them, so a small bump in demand snowballs into gluts and shortages.
Q 23What was the first item ever scanned with a UPC barcode at a checkout, in June 1974?
Wrigley's chewing gum
Q 14Which country took over the Panama Canal project from France in 1904 and opened it in 1914?
United States
The United States bought the French works for $40 million, finished the canal and ran it for most of the century, handing it to Panama at noon on 31 December 1999.
Q 15Which two engineers developed the Toyota Production System between 1948 and 1975?
Taiichi Ohno and Eiji Toyoda
Taiichi Ohno and Eiji Toyoda built on an idea from Sakichi Toyoda's automatic looms: a machine should stop itself the moment something goes wrong.
Q 16In the Toyota Production System, what is 'muda'?
Waste
Waste comes in seven classic kinds in Toyota's system; overproduction is called the worst, since making more than is needed breeds several of the others, from excess stock to extra handling.
Q 17The kanban scheduling system takes its name from the Japanese word for what?
Signboard
Signboard: the 'signs' are cards that travel with each bin of parts, and a card coming back up the line is the only permission to make more.
Q 18Which WWII cargo ships were built so fast that one was launched under five days after its keel was laid?
Liberty ships
Liberty ships were built from sections welded together, and American yards turned out 2,710 of them; the Robert E. Peary's 4 days 15 hours came from a race between shipyards.
Q 19Which future Waymo chief coined the term 'lean production' in a 1988 article?
John Krafcik
John Krafcik coined it in 'Triumph of the Lean Production System' while studying car plants around the world; the 1990 book The Machine That Changed the World carried the label to a mass audience.
Q 20The bullwhip effect describes what happening as you move upstream in a supply chain?
Order swings grow larger
Order swings grow larger at each step back from the shop: Volvo once read a discount-driven rush on green cars as real demand and built even more of them.
Wrigley's chewing gum, a pack of Juicy Fruit, rang up 67 cents at a Marsh supermarket in Troy, Ohio; the shopper later said he picked it because no one had been sure a barcode could be printed on something that small.
Q 24George Laurer designed the UPC barcode as an engineer at which company?
IBM
IBM's stripes were chosen over round bullseye symbols like RCA's, which took up too much of the label and smeared when printed.
Q 25The standard North American pallet, 48 by 40 inches, was set by a trade association from which industry?
Groceries
Groceries set the size through the Grocery Manufacturers Association, yet it never became a world standard: Europe and Asia favour other sizes, and ISO recognises six in all.
Q 26Roughly how many pallets are estimated to be in circulation across the US?
About 2 billion
About 2 billion pallets are in use, a habit that dates from World War II, when the demands of military supply first put them to work on a vast scale.
Q 27Incoterms, the three-letter terms that divide costs and risk in trade contracts, are published by which body?
The International Chamber of Commerce
The International Chamber of Commerce is a business group, not a government body; it has published the terms since 1936 as ready-made definitions that traders in any country can write into a contract.
Q 28Which Incoterm ends the seller's cost and risk on board ship?
FOB
FOB, Free On Board, is one of four terms meant only for sea and inland waterway freight, and not for containers: once a box is sealed, nobody can check the state of the goods as they are loaded.
Q 29A bill of lading is a document issued by whom?
The carrier
The carrier issues it as a receipt once the cargo is loaded, and because the bill is negotiable, the buyer who presents it at the far end is the one who takes delivery.
Q 30Where did the founder of FedEx first set out his idea for an overnight delivery network?
In a Yale term paper
In a Yale term paper, written as an economics student in the 1960s; legend says it earned a C, though he later said he could not remember the grade.