Trivia Questions and Answers

1. How many bones are in the adult human body?

206. A newborn has closer to 300. Many of them fuse on the way to adulthood, which is why the number goes down as you grow.

2. Which letter of the alphabet does not appear in the name of any US state?

Q. Every other letter turns up somewhere, including the Z in Arizona and the J in New Jersey.

3. What does the S in Harry S. Truman stand for?

Nothing. His parents could not choose between two grandfathers whose names began with S, so they gave him the initial and left it at that.

4. How many keys are on a standard piano?

88. Fifty-two white and thirty-six black, spanning a little over seven octaves.

5. What color is the flight recorder that everyone calls a black box?

Bright orange. The point is to be found in wreckage, which is the opposite of what black would do.

6. Which common food does not spoil, even after decades in the jar?

Honey. It is acidic and holds almost no free water, so bacteria and yeast cannot grow in it. Sealed and kept dry, it crystallizes but does not go off.

7. What is the chemical symbol for potassium?

K. It comes from kalium, the Latin name, which is also why sodium is Na and not So.

8. How long does sunlight take to reach Earth?

About eight minutes and twenty seconds. If the Sun went out, you would have that long before anyone noticed.

9. How many hearts does an octopus have?

Three. Two push blood through the gills and one sends it around the body. The third stops beating when the octopus swims, which is part of why they would rather crawl.

10. Which organ produces insulin?

The pancreas. Specifically the beta cells in the islets of Langerhans, a name that sounds like a place and is actually a man.

11. What is a group of crows called?

A murder. Most of these collective nouns come from a fifteenth century English hunting book, which is also where a parliament of owls comes from.

12. What is the hardest naturally occurring substance on Earth?

Diamond. Hardest means hardest to scratch, not hardest to break. A hammer will shatter one.

13. In which year did the Berlin Wall fall?

1989. The crossings opened on the night of 9 November, after an East German spokesman misread a note at a press conference.

14. Who was the first Roman emperor?

Augustus. He was born Gaius Octavius and took the name Augustus in 27 BC, while carefully never using the word king.

15. Which empire built Machu Picchu?

The Inca. It went up around 1450 and was abandoned about a century later. The Spanish never found it.

16. Who was the first US president to live in the White House?

John Adams. He moved in during 1800, near the end of his only term, while the building was still unfinished.

17. Which treaty formally ended the First World War?

The Treaty of Versailles, signed in June 1919. The fighting had stopped seven months earlier with the armistice.

18. Did Cleopatra live closer in time to the building of the Great Pyramid, or to the Moon landing?

The Moon landing. The Great Pyramid was already more than two thousand years old when she was born.

19. What is the smallest country in the world?

Vatican City, about a fifth of a square mile. You can walk across it during a phone call.

20. Which two countries share the longest international border?

The United States and Canada, a little over 5,500 miles once you count Alaska.

21. What is the capital of Brazil?

Brasília. It was built from empty savannah and inaugurated in 1960, specifically to drag the country's center of gravity away from the coast.

22. Which river runs through Baghdad?

The Tigris. Its twin, the Euphrates, runs roughly parallel about thirty miles to the west.

23. How many time zones does Russia span?

Eleven. When the working day starts in Kaliningrad, it is already evening in Kamchatka.

24. Which is the only sea on Earth with no coastline?

The Sargasso Sea. It sits inside the North Atlantic and is bounded by four ocean currents rather than by land.

25. How many strings does a standard violin have?

Four, tuned in fifths: G, D, A and E.

26. What does the marking forte mean in written music?

Loud. Piano means soft, which is why the instrument that could do both was originally called a pianoforte.

27. Which was the last album the Beatles recorded together?

Abbey Road. Let It Be was released later but recorded earlier, which is why the order confuses people.

28. What instrument does a timpanist play?

The kettledrums. Unlike most drums they are tuned to specific pitches, usually with a foot pedal.

29. What nationality was the composer Frédéric Chopin?

Polish. He left Warsaw at twenty and spent the rest of his life in France, and asked for his heart to be returned to Poland.

30. How many lines are there in a musical staff?

Five, with four spaces between them. Notes above or below sit on their own short lines, called ledger lines.

31. Which television series opened with the words "Space: the final frontier"?

Star Trek. It first aired in 1966 and was canceled after three seasons, which is roughly the opposite of what its reputation suggests.

32. Which country's film industry is known as Nollywood?

Nigeria. It grew out of films shot straight to video in the 1990s and now turns out more titles a year than Hollywood does.

33. Which film is the line "Play it again, Sam" misquoted from?

Casablanca, where nobody ever says it. Ilsa says "Play it, Sam", and Rick, later and angrier, just says "Play it".

34. Which actor played James Bond in the most official Bond films?

Roger Moore, with seven. Sean Connery made six official ones plus one outside the series.

35. What was Disney's first feature-length animated film?

Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, 1937. The industry called it Disney's Folly right up until it opened.

36. What is the name of the motel in Psycho?

The Bates Motel. Hitchcock shot in black and white partly because the shower scene in color would have been unreleasable in 1960.

37. How many players from one team are on the field in soccer?

Eleven, including the goalkeeper.

38. How many points is a touchdown worth?

Six. It was worth five until 1912, and earlier still the kick afterwards was the part that scored.

39. What is the inside diameter of a basketball hoop?

Eighteen inches. A men's regulation ball is about nine and a half, so two of them will not fit through at once.

40. In tennis, what is a score of zero called?

Love. The most common explanation is the French l'oeuf, an egg, for the shape of the nought.

41. How many holes are played in a full round of golf?

Eighteen, a number that comes from the layout at St Andrews rather than from any rule about how long a round should be.

42. How often are the Summer Olympic Games held?

Every four years. That gap has a name, an Olympiad, which technically refers to the interval rather than to the games.

43. Which spice comes from the hand-picked stigmas of a crocus flower?

Saffron. It takes roughly 150 flowers to make a single gram, which is the entire explanation for the price.

44. What is the main ingredient in hummus?

Chickpeas. The word hummus is simply Arabic for chickpea.

45. Which country did the croissant originate in?

Austria. The Viennese kipferl came first, and the French turned it into laminated pastry in the nineteenth century.

46. What is tofu made from?

Soybeans. Soy milk is curdled and pressed, which is the same basic process as making cheese.

47. Botanically speaking, which is a berry: a strawberry or a banana?

The banana. A strawberry is an aggregate accessory fruit, and the little specks on the outside are the actual fruits.

48. Which spirit is made from the blue agave plant?

Tequila. To carry the name it has to come from a defined region of Mexico, mostly the state of Jalisco.

49. Which poet wrote "Do not go gentle into that good night"?

Dylan Thomas, who wrote it for his dying father. It was published in 1951, two years before Thomas himself died at thirty-nine.

50. Who wrote Nineteen Eighty-Four?

George Orwell, published in 1949. Orwell was a pen name; he was born Eric Blair.

51. Who painted the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel?

Michelangelo, who considered himself a sculptor and took the commission reluctantly. He painted standing up, not lying down.

52. In Greek myth, who was condemned to roll a boulder uphill forever?

Sisyphus. The punishment was for cheating death twice, which the gods took personally.

53. What is the first Harry Potter book called in the United Kingdom?

Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone. The American publisher changed it, on the theory that philosopher sounded less magical to children.

54. Which artist cut off part of his own ear?

Vincent van Gogh, in Arles in 1888. He sold very little in his lifetime and painted most of his best-known work in the last two years of it.

55. What does HTTP stand for?

HyperText Transfer Protocol. The S in HTTPS is the encryption layer wrapped around it.

56. Who invented the World Wide Web?

Tim Berners-Lee, at CERN in 1989. He gave the whole thing away for free, which is the reason it became the web rather than a product.

57. What does the G in 5G stand for?

Generation. Not gigabit, not speed. It is simply the fifth generation of mobile network standards.

58. Which 1972 game turned arcade machines into a mass-market business?

Pong. The first cabinet reportedly jammed because its coin box, a milk carton, had filled up.

59. How many bytes are in a kilobyte?

1,000 under the standard definition, 1,024 under the older binary convention. That disagreement is why a hard drive always looks smaller once you plug it in.

60. What does CAPTCHA stand for?

Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart. Turing is hiding in the middle of it.