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50 free Three Gorges Dam trivia questions with answers — technology quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
The Three Gorges Dam is the biggest power station on Earth, and this quiz treats it as a story rather than a spec sheet. It starts with Sun Yat-sen's 1919 dream, an American engineer's 1944 survey, Mao's poem after the 1954 floods and the unusually grudging 1992 vote in the National People's Congress, then follows the concrete: 185 metres high, 2,335 metres long, 32 turbines of 700 MW each, and the ship lift that hoists 3,000-ton vessels 113 metres in a few minutes. There are questions on what the dam is for (flood control, shipping, power) and what it cost (180 billion yuan, 1.3 million people, the baiji and the Chinese paddlefish), on the underwater museum built to save 1,200 years of carved fish, on the world output record of 2020, on why it now supplies less than 1% of China's electricity, and on the odd fact that NASA says it made the day slightly longer. Easy questions suit anyone who knows where the Yangtze is; the expert tier asks about lock dimensions and Francis turbines. For dams in general, try our Dams quiz. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's articles on the dam, the Yangtze, the gorges and the species affected, and the supporting sentence is attached to each question.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01The Three Gorges Dam spans which river?
The Yangtze
It sits near Sandouping in Yichang, just downstream of the gorges that give it its name.
Q 02In which Chinese province is the Three Gorges Dam?
Hubei
The reservoir behind it stretches hundreds of kilometres back towards Chongqing.
Q 03What is the Three Gorges Dam's installed generating capacity, the largest of any power station on Earth?
22,500 MW
The next-biggest hydro plant, also in China, manages 16,000 MW.
Q 04How many main turbines does the Three Gorges power plant have?
32
Two smaller 50 MW units power the plant itself.
Q 05What is the output of each of the dam's main generators?
700 MW
Each unit weighs about 6,000 tonnes and spins at 75 revolutions per minute.
Q 06Which Chinese revolutionary leader first envisioned a great dam on China's longest river, in a 1919 book?
Sun Yat-sen
He reckoned a dam of 30 million horsepower was possible downstream of the gorges.
Q 07Which agency's chief engineer, John L. Savage, drew up a dam proposal in 1944?
US Bureau of Reclamation
Some 54 Chinese engineers went to America for training, but the civil war halted the plan.
Q 08What was Mao Zedong's 1956 poem about a dam on the river called?
Swimming
Two years later, after the Hundred Flowers Campaign, engineers who criticised the project were imprisoned.
Q 09Which nearby dam did Mao's government build first, before the Three Gorges, between 1970 and 1988?
Gezhouba Dam
Its profits later helped fund the Three Gorges, and water released from the big dam still powers it downstream.
Q 10What unusually low share of National People's Congress delegates voted for the Three Gorges Dam in 1992?
About 68%
Of 2,633 delegates, 177 voted against and 664 abstained.
Q 11On what date did construction of the Three Gorges Dam officially begin?
14 December 1994
The premier who launched it was himself a Moscow-trained hydroelectric engineer.
Q 12Which Moscow-trained Chinese premier championed and launched the Three Gorges project?
Li Peng
He later also began preparations for the Shenzhou crewed space programme.
Q 13In which year did the power plant become fully operational, with its last turbine online?
2012
The dam body itself had been finished six years earlier.
Q 14Roughly how tall is the Three Gorges Dam?
Q 21How many stages does each of the dam's two flights of ship locks have?
Five
Transit takes about four hours, and the chambers can hold ships of up to 10,000 tons.
Q 22What device, completed in 2016, lets vessels of up to 3,000 tons bypass the locks in well under an hour?
A ship lift
It climbs a toothed rack with helical gears and takes well under an hour.
Q 23What vertical distance does the dam's vessel elevator carry boats?
113 metres
The German firm Lahmeyer designed it; the first cargo ship was lifted in July 2016 in about eight minutes.
185 metres
Its concrete wall stands 181 m above the bedrock and the structure runs 2,335 m across the valley.
Q 15The dam used 463,000 tonnes of steel, enough to build how many Eiffel Towers?
63
It also swallowed 27.2 million cubic metres of concrete and moved 102.6 million cubic metres of earth.
Q 16What is the designed maximum water level of the reservoir above sea level?
175 metres
That is 110 m above the river downstream; the level is drawn down to 145 m each spring before the rains.
Q 17About how long is the reservoir behind the dam at full level?
660 km
It holds 39.3 cubic kilometres of water over a surface of about 1,045 square kilometres.
Q 18The dam cost an estimated 180 billion yuan. By which date had the entire cost been recovered?
December 2013
Nearly half of what was spent by 2008 went on relocating residents rather than on construction.
Q 19Estimates of how many people were displaced by the dam's reservoir range between what figures?
1.13 and 1.4 million
Some 13 cities, 140 towns and 1,350 villages were partly or wholly flooded.
Q 20Which Canadian photographer documented the dam's impact on towns such as Wanzhou between 2002 and 2005?
Edward Burtynsky
Israeli photographer Nadav Kander and Chengdu-based Muge also recorded the transformation.
Q 24Officials said the dam would boost annual shipping through the gorges tenfold, to what figure?
100 million tonnes
By 2022 the locks were handling nearly 160 million tons, well past the original goal.
Q 25The dam is meant to cut major floods from once every 10 years to once every how many?
100
Its flood storage capacity is 22 cubic kilometres.
Q 26The 1954 flood that killed 33,167 swamped which city of 8 million for over three months?
Wuhan
The Jingguang Railway was out of action for more than 100 days.
Q 27Which extinct river dolphin do some Chinese government scholars say the dam killed off directly?
Baiji
It is thought to be the first dolphin species driven to extinction by humans and has not been definitively seen in over 20 years.
Q 28Which giant river fish, once over 3.6 m long, was declared extinct in 2022?
Chinese paddlefish
Also called the Chinese swordfish, it was one of the largest primarily freshwater fish ever known.
Q 29Which critically endangered bird, with only 3,000-4,000 left, winters in wetlands threatened by the dam?
Siberian crane
The river basin holds 361 fish species and 27% of China's endangered freshwater fish.
Q 30In 2005 NASA scientists calculated that the water stored behind the dam would lengthen Earth's day by how much?
0.06 microseconds
The shifted mass also makes the planet very slightly rounder in the middle.