United Nations Trivia
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99 free United Nations trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
45 free United Nations trivia questions with answers. The United Nations was named by Franklin Roosevelt, signed into being in San Francisco and given a Manhattan home by a Rockefeller cheque. This quiz covers the organisation from the failed League of Nations to today's 193 members: the Atlantic Charter and the Declaration by United Nations, the six principal organs, the five permanent members and their veto, why the ICJ sits in The Hague, the six official languages, the blue helmets and their 1988 Nobel Prize, the secretaries-general from Trygve Lie to António Guterres, the flag's olive branches, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, UNICEF, WHO, the World Food Programme, the Millennium and Sustainable Development Goals, and the funding rows of the 2020s. Easy questions ask where the headquarters is and what colour the helmets are. Medium ones cover the founding dates, the agencies and the Nobel laureates. Hard ones want the man who coined the name, the interim secretary-general, the year Indonesia walked out, the peacekeeping mission that has run since 1948, and who wrote the words to the Hymn to the United Nations. Every answer has been checked against reference articles on the UN and its bodies, and each question shows its citation once you have answered. Good for Model UN prep, a civics class or a pub quiz round.
30 of 99 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01The Charter of the United Nations was signed in 1945 in which city?
San Francisco
San Francisco hosted delegates of 50 nations for two months; Poland, whose new government was formed too late to send anyone, signed the Charter afterwards and still counts among the 51 founding members.
Q 02Which US president is credited with coining the term 'United Nations' to describe the wartime Allies?
Franklin D. Roosevelt
Franklin D. Roosevelt's phrase first appeared officially on 1 January 1942, when 26 Allied governments signed a declaration pledging to fight on together and make no separate peace.
Q 03United Nations Day, 24 October, marks the anniversary of which 1945 event?
The UN Charter taking effect
The UN Charter taking effect had to wait four months after the signing, until the five permanent Security Council powers and a majority of the other signatories had ratified it.
Q 04A tapestry copy of which Picasso painting was hung outside the Security Council chamber in 1985?
Guernica
Guernica's tapestry was hidden behind a curtain in February 2003, when Colin Powell came to the UN to argue for war in Iraq in front of the cameras that usually face it.
Q 05Which country joined the UN in July 2011, becoming its 193rd member state?
South Sudan
South Sudan took its seat five days after independence, which followed a referendum in which almost 99 percent of voters chose to break away from Sudan.
Q 06Where is the headquarters of the United Nations?
New York City
New York City has housed the UN since the early 1950s; before the riverside towers were ready, most of its work was done in a gyroscope factory at Lake Success on Long Island.
Q 07Which family donated the money to buy the East River site for the UN headquarters?
The Rockefellers
The Rockefellers stepped in late: the UN was leaning towards Philadelphia until John D. Rockefeller Jr. offered $8.5 million in 1946 to buy the East River land from a developer.
Q 08Which neighbourhood's name is sometimes used as a nickname for the UN itself?
Turtle Bay
Turtle Bay, the neighbourhood surrounding the UN headquarters, is often used as shorthand for the organisation; slaughterhouses occupied the site before it was bought in 1946.
Q 09Which two architects' merged schemes became the final design of the UN headquarters?
Oscar Niemeyer and Le Corbusier
Oscar Niemeyer and Le Corbusier merged their plans only after Le Corbusier leaned on the younger Brazilian, whose own scheme the design board had already approved.
Q 10Which European country joined the United Nations only in 2002?
Switzerland
Switzerland's voters had rejected membership by three to one in 1986; a second referendum in March 2002 reversed that, and the country took its seat in September.
Q 11Which principal organ suspended its operations in 1994 after Palau gained independence?
The Trusteeship Council
The Trusteeship Council had run out of work: Palau was the last of the trust territories it supervised, so it suspended operations on 1 November 1994, though it still exists on paper.
Q 12Which of the UN's six principal organs sits in the Netherlands, away from UN headquarters?
The International Court of Justice
The International Court of Justice sits in the Peace Palace at The Hague, which opened in 1913 as a home for a court meant to end war, a year before the First World War began.
Q 13Which language was added in 1973 as the sixth official language of the United Nations?
Q 21Which country vetoed a second term for Boutros Boutros-Ghali in 1996?
America
America (the United States) cast the lone veto against a second term for Boutros-Ghali in November 1996, with the other 14 Council members supporting him.
Q 22In 1981 China cast 16 vetoes to stop which secretary-general winning a third term?
Kurt Waldheim
Kurt Waldheim was blocked round after round by Beijing, which wanted a Third World candidate, while Washington blocked Tanzania's Salim Ahmed Salim; the deadlock ended with a compromise choice from Peru.
Q 23António Guterres, who became UN secretary-general in 2017, is from which country?
Portugal
Portugal's prime minister from 1995, Guterres resigned midway through his second term after a drubbing in local elections, saying he wanted to keep the country out of a 'political swamp'.
Arabic
Arabic joined Chinese, English, French, Russian and Spanish after the Arab member states agreed to pay the costs themselves for the first three years; speeches are now interpreted live between all six.
Q 14Which Soviet leader is remembered for banging his shoe at the UN?
Khrushchev
Khrushchev was protesting in October 1960 at a Philippine delegate who accused Moscow of denying freedom to Eastern Europe; witnesses disagree on whether the shoe was banged or only waved.
Q 15Which of these countries holds one of the five permanent seats on the UN Security Council?
France
France has held its seat since 1945 as one of the victorious Allies; Germany, Japan, India and Brazil, the 'G4', have campaigned together for permanent seats of their own.
Q 16Which Secretary-General shared the 2001 Nobel Peace Prize with the United Nations?
Kofi Annan
Kofi Annan had headed UN peacekeeping during the Rwandan genocide, a failure he later said he regretted; seven years on, he and the organisation shared the prize.
Q 17In 1971 the PRC took the Chinese Security Council seat from the government based where?
Taiwan
Taiwan had been the Nationalists' base since they lost the mainland in 1949, so for 22 years a government ruling one island held a permanent seat and its veto; the Assembly voted 76 to 35 to seat Beijing.
Q 18Where did the first session of the General Assembly convene in January 1946?
London
London lent the Assembly Methodist Central Hall in Westminster; the very first resolution adopted there, on 24 January 1946, set up a commission to work towards ridding the world of atomic weapons.
Q 19Which Norwegian was the first elected secretary-general of the United Nations, in 1946?
Trygve Lie
Trygve Lie, as Norway's justice minister in the 1930s, let the exiled Leon Trotsky settle in the country, then forced him out again under pressure from Stalin.
Q 20Which secretary-general died in a 1961 plane crash on a Congo peace mission, winning a posthumous Nobel?
Dag Hammarskjöld
Dag Hammarskjöld was flying to ceasefire talks when his plane came down near Ndola; the cause has never been settled, and in 2015 the UN appointed a new panel to examine fresh evidence.
Q 24Which country walked out of the UN in 1965 in protest at Malaysia's seat on the Security Council?
Indonesia
Indonesia's President Sukarno even set up a rival body, CONEFO; the UN treated the walkout as a pause in cooperation, and Jakarta took its seat back in 1966 after power changed hands.
Q 25What colour are the helmets that give UN peacekeepers their nickname?
Blue
Blue helmets or berets are the only UN kit most peacekeepers wear: troops keep their own countries' uniforms, and the headgear and a badge mark them out. The forces won the 1988 Nobel Peace Prize.
Q 26The UN's first armed peacekeeping force was created in November 1956 in response to what?
The Suez Crisis
The Suez Crisis ended with UN troops replacing the invading British, French and Israeli forces; Canada's Lester Pearson, who proposed the force, won the 1957 Nobel Peace Prize for it.
Q 27UNTSO, the UN's oldest peacekeeping mission, has monitored ceasefires since 1948 in which region?
The Middle East
The Middle East received unarmed UN observers in May 1948 to supervise a truce in the first Arab-Israeli war; within months the UN's own mediator, Count Folke Bernadotte, was assassinated in Jerusalem.
Q 28The 1950 resolution authorising a US-led force in Korea passed only because which member was absent?
The Soviet Union
The Soviet Union was boycotting the Council over the PRC's exclusion, so it could not veto the June 1950 resolution that authorised force in Korea.
Q 29Who chaired the committee that drafted the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights?
Eleanor Roosevelt
Eleanor Roosevelt steered the drafting for nearly two years; when the Assembly adopted the text in Paris in December 1948, with no votes against, the delegates gave her a standing ovation.
Q 30The Human Rights Council, which replaced the Commission on Human Rights in 2006, meets in which city?
Geneva
Geneva hosts the 47-member Council, created after the old Commission was discredited for letting states with poor human rights records sit in judgment on others.