75 Trivia Questions for Teens

1. Which chemical symbol would you write for gold in a chemistry test?

2. What is the hardest natural material found on Earth?

3. Which gas makes up most of the air you breathe?

4. On the pH scale, what number does pure water score at room temperature?

5. Which metal is a liquid at room temperature?

6. What do scientists call it when a solid turns straight into a gas, like dry ice does?

7. Which part of a plant cell captures sunlight to make food?

8. What gas do plants take in from the air to build sugar during photosynthesis?

9. What is the name of the scattering effect that makes the daytime sky look blue?

10. Roughly how fast does light travel through empty space?

11. Which scientist is famous for the equation E = mc²?

12. What is the tiny, dense center of an atom called?

13. Which planet orbits closest to the Sun?

14. Which planet is the hottest, even though it is not the closest to the Sun?

15. About how long does sunlight take to travel from the Sun to Earth?

16. Which planet spins tipped over on its side, tilted about 98 degrees?

17. Olympus Mons, the biggest volcano in the solar system, is on which planet?

18. About how long does the International Space Station take to circle Earth once?

19. Which element makes up most of the Sun?

20. What is the name of the galaxy our solar system belongs to?

21. A shooting star streaking across the night sky is actually what?

22. In 2006, astronomers reclassified which world as a dwarf planet?

23. What is the boundary around a black hole called, past which nothing can escape?

24. Which planet has the shortest day, spinning once in about 10 hours?

25. What is the longest river in Africa?

26. What is the smallest country in the world by area?

27. What is the capital city of Canada?

28. What is the capital city of Australia?

29. Mount Everest sits on the border between Nepal and which other country?

30. Lake Baikal, the deepest lake on Earth, is in which country?

31. Which narrow strait separates Spain from Morocco?

32. The historic city of Timbuktu is in which African country?

33. Istanbul is split between two continents. Which country is it in?

34. What is the capital of Iceland?

35. What is the largest hot desert on Earth?

36. Which country is also a whole continent on its own?

37. Which river flows through the middle of Paris?

38. What is the largest organ of the human body?

39. Where in your body is the smallest bone?

40. Which colored part of your eye changes the size of your pupil?

41. Hiccups happen when which muscle suddenly spasms?

42. What is the hardest substance in the human body?

43. Which vitamin does your skin make when sunlight hits it?

44. What is the longest bone in the human body?

45. Which snail-shaped part of the inner ear turns sound vibrations into nerve signals?

46. Which blood cells are your body's main defense against germs?

47. How many chambers does the human heart have?

48. Which organ makes insulin to control the sugar in your blood?

49. What are the tiny muscles called that make your hairs stand up as goosebumps?

50. Who painted the Mona Lisa?

51. Which inventor built a printing press with movable metal type in Europe around 1440?

52. In 1957, which country launched Sputnik 1, the first artificial satellite?

53. Near which town in North Carolina did the Wright brothers make their famous 1903 flights?

54. Which country gave the Statue of Liberty to the United States?

55. In 1796, Edward Jenner developed the first vaccine against which disease?

56. Paper was first invented in which ancient civilization?

57. Which computer scientist invented the World Wide Web in 1989?

58. Which is the only one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World that still stands?

59. Machu Picchu, the mountaintop city in Peru, was built by which civilization?

60. Which scientist described three laws of motion and the law of universal gravitation?

61. Which city hosted the first modern Olympic Games in 1896?

62. Who was the first woman to win a Nobel Prize?

63. The word emoji comes from which language?

64. What does the image format GIF stand for?

65. The # symbol on your keyboard has an old, odd name from telephone engineers. What is it?

66. What is the & symbol called?

67. What do you call a word that reads the same forwards and backwards, like racecar?

68. What is the term for a word that imitates a sound, like buzz or sizzle?

69. What is the term for a word made by blending two others, like brunch from breakfast and lunch?

70. The word robot first appeared in a 1920 play by a writer from which country?

71. Computers store information using which two digits?

72. What does the e in email stand for?

73. What does URL, the address you type into a browser, stand for?

74. What does CPU, the main chip in a computer, stand for?

75. What is the name for an intense fear of spiders?