50 Hard Trivia Questions

1. Which metal melts at about 30 °C (86 °F), low enough to melt in your hand?

2. Which element has the highest electronegativity, meaning it pulls on shared electrons hardest?

3. By mass, which element is the most abundant in Earth's crust?

4. In plant cells, which organelle carries out photosynthesis?

5. In 1897, physicist J. J. Thomson discovered which subatomic particle?

6. Which SI base unit measures luminous intensity?

7. How many chromosomes are found in a typical human body cell?

8. In which layer of the atmosphere does nearly all weather happen?

9. Which element has the atomic number 79?

10. What is the most abundant protein in the human body?

11. Which noble gas is the most plentiful in Earth's atmosphere?

12. Which planet in our solar system has the highest average density?

13. Titan, the only moon known to have a thick atmosphere, orbits which planet?

14. What is the closest known star to the Sun?

15. What is the name for the point in the Moon's orbit where it is farthest from Earth?

16. What is the name of the larger of Mars's two moons?

17. What is the largest object in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter?

18. What is the name of the boundary where the Sun's solar wind gives way to interstellar space?

19. Which scientist worked out the three laws of planetary motion, including that orbits are ellipses?

20. What is the capital of Myanmar?

21. Which African country was historically known as Abyssinia?

22. The Blue Nile and the White Nile meet in which capital city?

23. What is the capital of Mongolia?

24. What is the highest mountain in South America?

25. What is the capital of Burkina Faso?

26. Thimphu is the capital of which country?

27. What is the largest of Japan's main islands?

28. Lake Victoria is shared by Uganda, Kenya and which other country?

29. The Sargasso Sea is unusual because it is bounded by what instead of land?

30. Mount Kosciuszko is the highest mountain on the mainland of which country?

31. Who led the first expedition to reach the South Pole, in December 1911?

32. Which scholar announced in 1822 that he had deciphered Egyptian hieroglyphs, using the Rosetta Stone?

33. The ancient Colossus, one of the Seven Wonders, stood on which Greek island?

34. The ruins of ancient Carthage lie in which modern country?

35. Which ancient people developed cuneiform, one of the earliest writing systems?

36. What is the capital of Nunavut, Canada's largest territory?

37. Which naturalist came up with the theory of evolution by natural selection independently of Charles Darwin?

38. Which Greek philosopher tutored the young Alexander the Great?

39. Around 240 BCE, which Greek scholar estimated Earth's circumference using shadows?

40. Which Portuguese explorer was the first European to reach India by sea, in 1498?

41. Which element was named after the Greek word for the Sun, because it was first detected in sunlight?

42. What is the SI unit of magnetic flux density?

43. What is the sum of the interior angles of a simple hexagon drawn on a flat plane?

44. Which year is written MCMXCIX in Roman numerals?

45. About how many degrees are in one radian?

46. A sesquicentennial celebrates how many years?

47. The metric prefix 'nano-' means what fraction of a unit?

48. What is the smallest perfect number, one that equals the sum of its other divisors?

49. What is a word that can mean its own opposite, like 'dust' (add dust or remove it), called?

50. The ruins of Persepolis, ceremonial capital of the ancient Achaemenid Persian Empire, are in which modern country?