75 Trivia Questions for Students

1. Which part of a cell is nicknamed its powerhouse because it releases energy from food?

2. What is the chemical formula for table salt, sodium chloride?

3. Which element has atomic number 1 on the periodic table?

4. What is the SI unit used to measure force?

5. Which type of rock forms when lava or magma cools and hardens?

6. What is the process called when plants release water vapor through tiny pores in their leaves?

7. Which blood vessels carry blood away from the heart?

8. Which naturalist sailed on HMS Beagle and later explained evolution by natural selection?

9. What small molecules link together in chains to build proteins?

10. Which chemist published an early periodic table in 1869 and left gaps for elements not yet discovered?

11. What do you call an animal that eats both plants and other animals?

12. What is the SI unit of electrical resistance?

13. A ramp used to raise a heavy load with less effort is which simple machine?

14. What is the square root of 144?

15. How many sides does a hexagon have?

16. What is the value of pi rounded to two decimal places?

17. What do the three interior angles of a triangle on a flat plane add up to?

18. What is the name for a polygon with 12 sides?

19. What is the only even prime number?

20. Which Roman numeral stands for 50?

21. The Pythagorean theorem works on which kind of triangle?

22. What is the longest side of a right triangle called?

23. What number comes next in the Fibonacci sequence: 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, ...?

24. In math, what does 0! (zero factorial) equal?

25. A googol is 1 followed by how many zeros?

26. What is the largest ocean on Earth?

27. Which river carries more water than any other river on Earth?

28. Which mountain range is traditionally used as the boundary between Europe and Asia in Russia?

29. What is the capital city of Brazil?

30. What is the capital city of Egypt?

31. Which South American country is named after the imaginary line that circles the middle of Earth?

32. Which is the largest country in the world by area?

33. Which continent has the most countries?

34. What is the name of the line of 0° longitude that runs through Greenwich, England?

35. The Great Barrier Reef lies off the coast of which Australian state?

36. Mount Kilimanjaro, Africa's highest mountain, is in which country?

37. Which is the largest island in the world that is not a continent?

38. The Danube, which flows through Vienna and Budapest, empties into which sea?

39. Which ruler first unified China in 221 BCE and was buried with an army of terracotta warriors?

40. In what year was the Magna Carta sealed in England?

41. The Rosetta Stone helped scholars learn to read which ancient writing system?

42. Which civilization built the pyramid city of Chichén Itzá in Mexico?

43. The Renaissance, a rebirth of art and learning, began in which country in the 1300s?

44. Which ancient Greek city-state is known for developing an early form of democracy?

45. The Lighthouse of Pharos, one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, stood in which city?

46. The Industrial Revolution began in the 1700s in which country?

47. The Code of Hammurabi, one of the oldest written law codes, came from which ancient civilization?

48. Which ancient people carved the rose-red city of Petra into cliffs in present-day Jordan?

49. The Silk Road was a network of trade routes linking China with which region to the west?

50. Most of the best-preserved Great Wall of China that visitors see today was built during which dynasty?

51. What do you call words with opposite meanings, like hot and cold?

52. An English classroom haiku uses lines of 5, 7 and 5 syllables. How many syllables is that in total?

53. Which part of speech describes a noun, like tall in the tall tree?

54. What is a comparison that uses like or as, such as busy as a bee?

55. Which literary device gives human qualities to things that are not human, like the wind whispered?

56. Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers is a famous example of what?

57. Words like there, their and they're that sound the same but mean different things are called what?

58. How many lines are in a traditional sonnet?

59. What is the main character of a story usually called?

60. Saying I have told you a million times is an example of which figure of speech?

61. Which punctuation mark can join two closely related complete sentences without a word like and?

62. The prefix tele-, as in telescope and telephone, means what?

63. Who was the first person to walk on the Moon, in 1969?

64. The Great Red Spot, a storm bigger than Earth, is found on which planet?

65. Which planet takes longer to rotate once on its axis than to complete one orbit around the Sun?

66. Which astronomer spotted four large moons of Jupiter with his telescope in 1610?

67. What are Saturn's rings mostly made of?

68. What makes Mars look red?

69. Which planet is the farthest from the Sun?

70. What causes Earth to have seasons?

71. Which star is closest to Earth?

72. In 1961, who became the first human to travel into space?

73. A light-year is a measure of what?

74. What is the name of Saturn's largest moon?

75. Which spacecraft became the first human-made object to reach interstellar space, in 2012?