Trivia Questions for Adults

Which English writer coined the word 'serendipity' in 1754?

1. Samuel Johnson
2. Jonathan Swift
3. Alexander Pope
4. Horace Walpole

Which Surrealist painted 'The Persistence of Memory' in 1931?

1. Salvador Dalí
2. René Magritte
3. Joan Miró
4. Max Ernst

Which architect took charge of Barcelona's Sagrada Família in 1883 and shaped its famous design?

1. Le Corbusier
2. Antoni Gaudí
3. Frank Lloyd Wright
4. Christopher Wren

Which 1851 novel opens with the famous line 'Call me Ishmael'?

1. Robinson Crusoe
2. Treasure Island
3. Moby-Dick
4. Gulliver's Travels

Which naturalist made his name as a geologist and fossil collector on the second voyage of HMS Beagle?

1. Alfred Russel Wallace
2. Joseph Banks
3. Gregor Mendel
4. Charles Darwin

Which composer was almost completely deaf by the premiere of his own Ninth Symphony?

1. Ludwig van Beethoven
2. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
3. Joseph Haydn
4. Franz Schubert

Which treaty formally ended the state of war between Germany and most of the Allied Powers after World War I?

1. Treaty of Utrecht
2. Treaty of Versailles
3. Treaty of Westphalia
4. Treaty of Tordesillas

Mansa Musa, often called one of the richest people in history, ruled which West African empire?

1. Songhai Empire
2. Ghana Empire
3. Mali Empire
4. Ashanti Empire

In sheet music, the marking 'forte' tells a player to play how?

1. Softly
2. Slowly
3. Quickly
4. Loud

Which Irish writer wrote the play 'Waiting for Godot'?

1. Oscar Wilde
2. Samuel Beckett
3. George Bernard Shaw
4. J. M. Synge

In which fictional town is Gabriel García Márquez's novel 'One Hundred Years of Solitude' set?

1. Comala
2. Yoknapatawpha
3. Macondo
4. Santa Teresa

James Joyce's novel 'Ulysses' follows three characters through a single day in which city?

1. Belfast
2. Cork
3. London
4. Dublin

The Bosporus strait connects the Sea of Marmara to which sea?

1. Black Sea
2. Aegean Sea
3. Caspian Sea
4. Adriatic Sea

Lake Titicaca, high in the Andes, sits on the border between Peru and which other country?

1. Chile
2. Bolivia
3. Ecuador
4. Argentina

Which American virologist developed one of the first successful polio vaccines?

1. Louis Pasteur
2. Robert Koch
3. Jonas Salk
4. Alexander Fleming

The Pharos of Alexandria, one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, was what kind of structure?

1. A temple
2. A statue
3. A tomb
4. A lighthouse

Hammurabi, author of a famous early law code, was the sixth king of the First Dynasty of which city?

1. Babylon
2. Nineveh
3. Memphis
4. Thebes

What is the Japanese art of repairing broken pottery so the cracks are traced in gold?

1. Ikebana
2. Kintsugi
3. Raku
4. Bonsai

The word 'tsunami' was borrowed into English from which language?

1. Chinese
2. Korean
3. Japanese
4. Hawaiian

Which French phrase, literally 'already seen', names the eerie feeling of having lived a moment before?

1. Déjà vu
2. Je ne sais quoi
3. Fait accompli
4. Raison d'être

The oboe, a double-reed instrument, belongs to which family of instruments?

1. Brass
2. Woodwind
3. Strings
4. Percussion

Which Italian composer wrote the opera 'La traviata'?

1. Giacomo Puccini
2. Gioachino Rossini
3. Giuseppe Verdi
4. Gaetano Donizetti

Which French Impressionist painted a series of about 250 pictures called 'Water Lilies'?

1. Pierre-Auguste Renoir
2. Edgar Degas
3. Camille Pissarro
4. Claude Monet

Pablo Picasso pioneered Cubism in partnership with which French painter?

1. Georges Braque
2. Henri Matisse
3. Paul Cézanne
4. Marcel Duchamp

Which Norwegian artist created 'The Scream'?

1. Egon Schiele
2. Edvard Munch
3. Wassily Kandinsky
4. Paul Gauguin

In which Italian city is the Uffizi Gallery?

1. Rome
2. Milan
3. Florence
4. Venice

The State Hermitage Museum is in which Russian city?

1. Moscow
2. Kazan
3. Novgorod
4. Saint Petersburg

Seismology is the scientific study of what?

1. Earthquakes
2. Tides
3. Weather
4. Glaciers

The 'Ring of Fire', a belt of earthquakes and volcanoes, surrounds most of which ocean?

1. Atlantic Ocean
2. Pacific Ocean
3. Indian Ocean
4. Arctic Ocean

An international nautical mile is defined as exactly how many meters?

1. 1,609
2. 1,500
3. 2,000
4. 1,852

Which Renaissance genius wrote most of his personal notes in mirror writing?

1. Leonardo da Vinci
2. Michelangelo
3. Raphael
4. Galileo Galilei

Which American writer wrote the narrative poem 'The Raven'?

1. Walt Whitman
2. Edgar Allan Poe
3. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
4. Emily Dickinson

Puck, also called Robin Goodfellow, is a mischievous fairy in which Shakespeare play?

1. The Tempest
2. Twelfth Night
3. A Midsummer Night's Dream
4. As You Like It

Which Spanish navigator completed the first circumnavigation of the Earth, in the ship Victoria, on the Magellan expedition?

1. Francis Drake
2. Amerigo Vespucci
3. Bartolomeu Dias
4. Juan Sebastián Elcano

How many days are there in a fortnight?

1. 14
2. 10
3. 12
4. 21

France's national day, 14 July, marks the anniversary of the storming of which Paris fortress?

1. The Louvre
2. The Bastille
3. The Conciergerie
4. The Tuileries

In which German city on the Rhine was printing pioneer Johannes Gutenberg born?

1. Cologne
2. Nuremberg
3. Mainz
4. Frankfurt

The Silk Road trade network was begun by which Chinese dynasty's expansion into Central Asia?

1. Ming dynasty
2. Qing dynasty
3. Song dynasty
4. Han dynasty

The Great Sphinx of Giza has a human head on the body of which animal?

1. A lion
2. A bull
3. A jackal
4. A falcon

The Bauhaus, the hugely influential school of art and design, was founded in which country in 1919?

1. Austria
2. Switzerland
3. Germany
4. the Netherlands