Getting your questions ready
Getting your questions ready
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50 free Tricky trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
Tricky trivia questions are the ones your gut answers first, and wrongly. Which country has the most pyramids? Not Egypt. What is stored in a camel's hump? Not water. What colour is a black box, who or what is Frankenstein, and where were fortune cookies and Chinese checkers actually invented? Every question here is built around a common assumption or a familiar myth, so the fun is in catching yourself before you answer. The set mixes geography, science, history, animals, food and language, and it sits mostly in the medium range: nothing needs specialist knowledge, but everything rewards a second thought. It works well as a round for a pub quiz or family game night, because the arguments start the moment the answer is revealed. Difficulty is honest, so a few of the deeper cuts will catch even confident players. Every answer was checked against an encyclopaedia page and each question links its source, so when someone insists the Great Wall is visible from space, you can show them what NASA actually says.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01What is the capital city of Australia?
Canberra
The purpose-built capital was a compromise between rivals Sydney and Melbourne; Parliament moved there in 1927.
Q 02Which country has the most pyramids?
Sudan
The Kushite rulers of Nubia built around 255 steep-sided pyramids at sites such as Meroë, more than twice Egypt's total.
Q 03According to NASA, how visible is the Great Wall of China to the naked eye from low Earth orbit?
Barely, and only in near-perfect conditions
The claim that it is the only human structure visible from space dates back to the 1700s, long before anyone had been there.
Q 04Where does the image of Vikings wearing horned helmets mostly come from?
19th-century opera costumes
Contemporary texts mention helmets often but never horns; the look was popularised by Richard Wagner's productions in the 1800s.
Q 05Botanically speaking, the peanut is what kind of plant?
A legume
Its pods develop underground, which is why it is also called the groundnut; true nuts like hazelnuts grow on trees.
Q 06Which of these fruits is a berry in the strict botanical sense?
Banana
Botanical berries develop from a single ovary and include grapes, tomatoes and cucumbers; the strawberry's 'seeds' are actually the fruits.
Q 07In the 1893 case Nix v. Hedden, the US Supreme Court ruled that, for tariff purposes, the tomato is what?
A vegetable
The justices agreed it is a fruit botanically but said the tariff law used the everyday meaning of the words.
Q 08Roughly how long is a goldfish's memory span?
At least three months
They can be trained to respond to shapes, colours and sounds, and will learn to take food from a keeper's hand.
Q 09Which of these is classed as a desert, and is in fact the largest cold desert on Earth?
Antarctica
About 98% of it is ice sheet; the central plateau gets only around 50 mm of precipitation a year.
Q 10How did Albert Einstein actually perform in mathematics as a schoolboy?
He excelled well beyond his age
He enrolled in the maths and physics teaching programme at Zurich's polytechnic at 17; the 'failed maths' story is a durable myth.
Q 11In Mary Shelley's novel, who or what is Frankenstein?
The scientist
Victor Frankenstein builds his creature from stolen body parts; the monster itself is never given a name in the book.
Q 12Strictly speaking, what is Big Ben?
The great bell
The tower itself was called the Clock Tower until 2012, when it was renamed the Elizabeth Tower for the Diamond Jubilee.
Q 13What colour is an aircraft's 'black box' flight recorder?
Bright orange
The colour is mandated so searchers can spot the unit in wreckage; an early British model was even nicknamed the 'Red Egg'.
Q 21Roughly how much of the human brain do people actually use?
Virtually all of it
Brain mapping shows every region has a function and is active nearly all the time; the 10% figure traces to misread ideas from William James and others.
Q 22What is the actual risk from the poinsettia, the red-leaved Christmas plant, to children and pets?
Essentially none
Its reputation as a killer plant is a durable myth; at worst it can cause mild stomach upset.
Q 23The myth of lemming mass suicide was cemented by staged footage in a 1958 documentary from which studio?
Walt Disney
Q 14In which country was the board game Chinese checkers invented?
Germany
It appeared in 1892 as Stern-Halma; the 'Chinese' name was a 1928 marketing idea by American game makers Bill and Jack Pressman.
Q 15In Denmark, Norway and Sweden, what is a Danish pastry called?
Viennese bread
Austrian bakers are thought to have brought the laminated-dough techniques to Denmark, hence wienerbrød.
Q 16Fortune cookies, a US Chinese-restaurant staple, most likely came from immigrants from where?
Japan
Several California immigrant groups claim to have popularised them in the early 20th century, but they are not Chinese in origin.
Q 17The koala is often called a bear, but it is actually what kind of animal?
A marsupial
Like kangaroos, koalas give birth to tiny joeys that finish developing in a pouch.
Q 18The orca, or killer whale, is the largest member of which family?
Oceanic dolphins
Different orca populations specialise in different prey, from fish and rays to seals and even other whales.
Q 19Which planet has the hottest surface in the solar system?
Venus
Its thick carbon-dioxide atmosphere traps heat, pushing the surface to about 464 °C, hotter than closer-in Mercury.
Q 20What does a camel actually store in its hump?
Fat
Metabolising the fat yields some water as a by-product, which is probably how the water-storage myth began.
White Wilderness won an Oscar; the lemmings in it were reportedly pushed off a cliff by the crew.
Q 24Thomas Crapper is often credited with the flush toilet. What did he actually patent?
The floating ballcock, among other parts
He held nine patents in all and invented the U-bend in 1880, but the flush toilet predates him by centuries.
Q 25The line 'let them eat cake' is usually pinned on Marie Antoinette. Where does it actually first appear?
Rousseau's Confessions
Rousseau wrote it in 1765, when Marie Antoinette was nine years old and had never set foot in France.
Q 26What did educated Europeans in Columbus's time generally believe about the shape of the Earth?
That it was a sphere
The idea that medieval scholars thought the world was flat is a 19th-century invention, spread partly by Washington Irving.
Q 27How were the nineteen people executed as witches at Salem in 1692 put to death?
Hanged
One more man, Giles Corey, was pressed to death with stones for refusing to enter a plea.
Q 28Which US president is the only one to have spoken English as a second language?
Martin Van Buren
He grew up in Kinderhook, New York, where most residents spoke Dutch, and learned English at school.
Q 29What happens to the top of the Eiffel Tower on a hot, sunny day?
It leans away from the sun, up to 18 cm
The metal on the sunlit side expands more than the shaded side, so the tower bends very slightly away from the sun.
Q 30Bombay duck, a pungent dried delicacy of Anglo-Indian cooking, is what?
A fish
The lizardfish is caught around Mumbai, dried in the sun and traditionally coated in asafoetida.