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40 Hard Trivia Questions (With Answers) That Stump Almost Everyone

Four rounds of ten, built for the moment somebody slams the table and insists the answer is wrong. Answers at the end.

Written by Jiki, editor @ The Quiz Show

Easy trivia is fine for warming up. But if you want the round where somebody slams a hand on the table and insists the answer is wrong, you need questions that sit just beyond what people are confident about.

These forty are built for that. None of them is unfair — every answer is something you have probably heard at some point — but they are the kind of facts that slide out of your head the moment there are points on the line.

Read them out in four rounds of ten, keep the answers to yourself until the end of each round, and see how your group does. Anything over 25 is genuinely good.

Round 1: General knowledge

Nothing obscure here. These are the questions people are sure they know, right up until they have to say the answer out loud.

  1. Which letter does not appear in the name of any US state?
  2. How many hearts does an octopus have?
  3. How many keys are there on a standard piano?
  4. What colour is a polar bear’s skin underneath its fur?
  5. What is the smallest bone in the human body?
  6. Which is the only mammal that can truly fly?
  7. What does the G in 5G stand for?
  8. Which planet rotates on its side?
  9. What is a group of crows called?
  10. Which country has the most natural lakes?

Round 2: Geography

The round that separates the people who look at maps from the people who are about to find out they do not.

  1. What is the capital of Australia?
  2. Which country shares a land border with Portugal?
  3. Which sea has no coastline?
  4. What is the deepest lake in the world?
  5. Mount Everest sits on the border between which two countries?
  6. What is the longest river in Asia?
  7. Which country spans the most time zones?
  8. What is the smallest country in the world?
  9. Which large country has no permanent rivers at all?
  10. Which US state lies closest to Africa?

Round 3: History

Dates, wars and one fact about Cleopatra that nobody believes the first time they hear it.

  1. How long did the Hundred Years’ War actually last?
  2. Which of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World is still standing?
  3. Who was the first woman to win a Nobel Prize?
  4. In what year did the Berlin Wall come down?
  5. Which war was brought to an end by the Treaty of Versailles?
  6. How long was the shortest war in recorded history?
  7. True or false: Cleopatra lived closer in time to the Moon landing than to the building of the Great Pyramid.
  8. What was the name of the ship that carried the Pilgrims across the Atlantic in 1620?
  9. Which country gave the Statue of Liberty to the United States?
  10. Who was the longest-reigning British monarch?

Round 4: Science and nature

Half of these are things you learned at school. The other half are things school never got round to mentioning.

  1. What is the hardest naturally occurring substance on Earth?
  2. How many bones are there in an adult human body?
  3. What is the largest organ in the human body?
  4. Which gas do plants take in from the air?
  5. How long does sunlight take to reach the Earth?
  6. What is the chemical symbol for gold?
  7. Which land animal has the longest pregnancy?
  8. Which food never spoils, even after thousands of years?
  9. True or false: a banana is a berry and a strawberry is not.
  10. What is the loudest animal on Earth relative to its size?

The answers

Round 1: General knowledge

  1. Q
  2. Three — two pump blood to the gills, one to the rest of the body.
  3. 88
  4. Black
  5. The stapes, in the middle ear.
  6. The bat
  7. Generation
  8. Uranus
  9. A murder
  10. Canada, with more than the rest of the world put together.

Round 2: Geography

  1. Canberra — not Sydney, and not Melbourne.
  2. Spain, and only Spain.
  3. The Sargasso Sea, bounded by ocean currents rather than land.
  4. Lake Baikal, in Russia.
  5. Nepal and China.
  6. The Yangtze
  7. France, once its overseas territories are counted.
  8. Vatican City
  9. Saudi Arabia
  10. Maine

Round 3: History

  1. 116 years
  2. The Great Pyramid of Giza
  3. Marie Curie
  4. 1989
  5. The First World War
  6. About 38 minutes — the Anglo-Zanzibar War of 1896.
  7. True, and it is not close. The pyramid was already around 2,500 years old when she was born.
  8. The Mayflower
  9. France
  10. Queen Elizabeth II, for just over 70 years.

Round 4: Science and nature

  1. Diamond
  2. 206
  3. The skin
  4. Carbon dioxide
  5. About eight minutes and twenty seconds.
  6. Au
  7. The African elephant, at around 22 months.
  8. Honey
  9. True. Botanically a banana qualifies and a strawberry does not.
  10. The pistol shrimp, which stuns prey with the snap of its claw.

How did you do?

  • 35–40: You are the person other people want on their team. Possibly the person other people quietly resent.
  • 25–34: A strong score. You know a lot and you guess well, which is most of trivia.
  • 15–24: Respectable. You will win plenty of rounds and lose the tiebreakers.
  • Under 15: Good news — there are 40 facts here you now know and most people do not.

Want to find out where you actually stand? Our general knowledge quiz scores you properly, the geography quiz is the one that humbles everybody, and Are You Smarter Than a 5th Grader? is there if you fancy an honest answer to that question.