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60 free Waterfalls trivia questions with answers — geography quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
Every continent has a waterfall it thinks is the best, and this quiz visits most of them. It starts with the record-holders: Angel Falls and the pilot who crash-landed on top of it, the six-mile-wide Khone Phapheng, the Congo's Inga rapids, an underwater cataract in the Denmark Strait that dwarfs them all, and the dry one in Washington that was once the biggest ever. Then Niagara in detail: three falls, one Great Lake, a schoolteacher in a barrel, Blondin and Nik Wallenda on the wire, the day engineers switched the American Falls off and the day ice switched them all off. From there it crosses to Victoria Falls and its Devil's Pool, Iguazu's Devil's Throat and Eleanor Roosevelt's verdict on Niagara, Tugela's rival claim to be tallest, Kaieteur, Yosemite's hanging valleys, and a run of Icelandic falls with treasure legends and film cameos. Europe's Rhine, Marmore and Krimml, Croatia's Plitvice, China's Huangguoshu, India's Jog and Nohkalikai, and America's Multnomah, Havasu and Shoshone follow, along with the great falls of Guaíra and Celilo that dams put under water. Easy questions suit anyone who has stood in the spray of one; the expert tier reaches Lake Quill, Sigríður Tómasdóttir and Charles Barrington Brown. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's articles on the individual waterfalls, and the supporting sentence is attached to each question.
30 of 60 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Angel Falls, the world's tallest uninterrupted waterfall, is in which country?
Venezuela
It pours off the Auyán-tepui table mountain in Canaima National Park.
Q 02How tall is Angel Falls?
979 m (3,212 ft)
Its single uninterrupted plunge is 807 metres; the official height came from a 1949 survey funded by journalist Ruth Robertson.
Q 03Angel Falls is named after Jimmie Angel, who was what?
An American aviator
He flew over the falls in 1933 and in 1937 crash-landed his plane on top of the tepui trying to find gold.
Q 04Angel Falls was the main inspiration for Paradise Falls in which 2009 Pixar film?
Up
In 2009 Hugo Chávez also proposed renaming the falls with their indigenous Pemon name, Kerepakupai-Merú.
Q 05Which waterfall in Laos is the widest in the world, at over 10 kilometres across?
Khone Phapheng Falls
Its islands and channels give the area its name Si Phan Don, 'the 4,000 islands'; the falls stop boats reaching China up the Mekong.
Q 06Which river is home to the Inga Falls, the biggest waterfall in the world by flow rate?
The Congo
Its median discharge is 42,000 cubic metres a second, but many geographers class it as rapids rather than a true waterfall.
Q 07The largest waterfall on Earth by volume is actually underwater; where is it?
The Denmark Strait, off Greenland
Cold, dense water plunges some 3,500 metres, moving about 3.2 million cubic metres a second, far more than the Amazon.
Q 08Which Washington state waterfall, though it no longer flows, is the largest confirmed waterfall ever?
Dry Falls
It was carved by the catastrophic Ice Age Missoula floods.
Q 09Niagara Falls is a group of how many waterfalls?
Three
One of them straddles the border, while the American and Bridal Veil falls lie in New York.
Q 10Which of the Niagara cataracts is the largest, the one that straddles the Canada–US border?
Horseshoe
It stands about 57 metres high; boulders at the base of the American Falls cut its drop to as little as 21 metres.
Q 11Niagara Falls is formed by the Niagara River draining which of the Great Lakes into Ontario?
Erie
The combined falls have the highest flow rate of any waterfall in North America.
Q 12Who became the first person to go over Niagara Falls in a barrel, on 24 October 1901?
Annie Edson Taylor
The 63-year-old Michigan schoolteacher survived bleeding but otherwise unhurt, and made almost no money from the stunt.
Q 13Which French tightrope walker first crossed the Niagara Gorge on a wire in June 1859?
Blondin
He repeated the crossing eight more times that year, once carrying his manager on his back.
Q 21What is the 'Devil's Pool' on the Zambian side of Victoria Falls?
A natural rock basin at the lip
It sits at the tip of Livingstone Island and can be swum in low-water months.
Q 22Iguazu Falls sits on the border between which two countries?
Argentina and Brazil
Most of the roughly 275 individual falls are on the Argentine side.
Q 23What is the name of the long, narrow chasm into which about half of the Iguazu River plunges?
The Devil's Throat
Garganta del Diablo is 80 to 90 metres wide and up to 80 metres deep.
Q 14In 2012 which high-wire artist became the first in 116 years to walk across the Niagara Falls area?
Nik Wallenda
He needed special permission from both the US and Canadian governments.
Q 15What did engineers do to the American Falls at Niagara in June 1969?
Diverted the river to dry them up
A temporary rock-and-earth dam turned the falls off for several months so the rock face could be studied.
Q 16The only recorded complete stoppage of Niagara Falls happened in March 1848; what caused it?
An ice jam on Lake Erie
American Falls froze solid on its own in 1912, but the other two kept flowing.
Q 17Since hydro diversion slowed its flow, how fast has Niagara Falls eroded upstream?
About 30 centimetres a year
Historically it retreated 1 to 1.5 metres a year; since hydroelectric diversion reduced the flow, the rate has been roughly 30 centimetres a year.
Q 18Victoria Falls lies on which river, on the border between Zambia and Zimbabwe?
The Zambezi
Its Lozi name Mosi-oa-Tunya means 'the smoke that thunders'.
Q 19Which Scottish missionary named Victoria Falls after the queen in 1855?
David Livingstone
He first saw them from an island in mid-river that now bears his name.
Q 20Victoria Falls is often ranked first among the world's waterfalls on what basis?
The biggest single sheet of falling water
It is 1,708 metres wide and 108 metres high.
Q 24Which US First Lady reportedly exclaimed 'Poor Niagara!' on seeing Iguazu Falls?
Eleanor Roosevelt
Niagara, at about 50 metres, is roughly a third shorter.
Q 25The name Iguazu comes from Guarani words meaning what?
Big water
The Spanish conquistador Cabeza de Vaca was the first European to record the falls, in 1541.
Q 26Tugela Falls, by some measurements the world's tallest waterfall, is in which country?
South Africa
A 2016 Czech expedition measured its five leaps at 983 metres, above Angel Falls' official 979.
Q 27Yosemite Falls, one of the tallest in North America, drops a total of how far from top to base?
2,425 feet (739 m)
The upper fall alone plunges 1,430 feet; in most years the falls dry up entirely by late summer.
Q 28Kaieteur Falls, one of the world's most powerful single-drop waterfalls, is in which country?
Guyana
It drops 226 metres over a sandstone cliff on the Potaro River and was reported to Europeans by geologist Charles Barrington Brown in 1870.
Q 29Gullfoss, on Iceland's most popular tourist circuit, has a name meaning what?
Golden Falls
Farmer's daughter Sigríður Tómasdóttir is credited with saving it from a hydroelectric scheme, reportedly threatening to throw herself in.
Q 30Which Icelandic waterfall appears in the opening scene of Ridley Scott's 'Prometheus'?
Dettifoss
It is fed by the Jökulsá á Fjöllum river flowing off the Vatnajökull glacier.