From flasks and funnels to pipettes and particles, science is full with weird and wondrous facts. Whether its delving into cool chemistry trivia or the unique science of the human body, there is so much fodder for an epic quiz; one of the reasons why we’ve pulled together this piece featuring 100 of the best science trivia questions and answers.
Do your participants consider themselves geology geniuses or virology virtuosos? Let’s see how they (and you, of course), fare in this ultimate science quiz, packed with everything from out-of-this-world questions about the solar system, to closer to home quiz questions all about our favourite planet, Earth.
Ready? Let’s get this trivia party(cle) started!
Quiz Rounds
Easy Science Trivia Questions and Answers
It’s always worth getting the quiz night started with a (big) bang, but keeping the questions a little simple, to get those science brains whirring. With that in mind, here are ten nice and easy trivia questions about science:
1. In what tabular display are the chemical elements typically displayed?
2. What tissue connects bone to muscle?
3. Anaemia is caused by the deficiency of which mineral in the human diet?
4. How is ‘Sound Navigation and Ranging’ more commonly known?
5. At room temperature, what is the normal state of the element Mercury?
6. Which galaxy is Earth in?
7. What is the name given to the changing of direction of light as it travels through a lens?
8. Elemental gases such as helium, neon, argon and krypton are grouped under what honourable term?
9. What name is given to two metals mixed together, or a metal with another element?
10 .What is the largest land animal?
Read next: 100 easy movie trivia questions and answers
Easy Science Trivia Answers
- Periodic table
- Tendons
- Iron
- Sonar
- Liquid
- The Milky Way
- Refraction
- Noble gases
- Alloy
- Elephant
Linking Science Trivia Questions and Answers
How much do your quizzers know about the chemical elements? Or what brings together brilliant biological markers? In this second round, we ask them to link a few errant items; all of which have something in common.
1. What is missing: helium, argon, krypton, xenon, radon, (and oganesson)?
2. What is this sequence? Mercury (0), Venus (0), Earth (1), Mars (2), Neptune (14), Uranus (27), Saturn (62), and Jupiter (29).
3. What links the helix, scapha, triangular fossa and concha?
4. Which is the odd one out? Isaac Newton, Blaise Pascal, Edmond Halley, Charles Darwin, Pierre de Fermat.
5. What is missing: nitrogen (78), argon (0.93) and carbon dioxide (0.04)?
6. What links Isabela, Santa Cruz, San Cristobal, Fernandina and Santiago (among others)?
7. What do these percentages signify? Chimpanzees (96%), domestic cats (90%), mice (85%), cattle (80%)
8. What links thiamine, riboflavin, niacin, pantothenic acid, biotin and folic acid?
9. What links the following? Human (1), octopus (3), hagfish (4)
10. Of the following, what is the odd one out: Centillion, bajillion, decillion, googol?
Recommended Reading: 100 easy general knowledge quiz questions and answers
Linking Science Trivia Answers
- Neon (noble gases)
- Number of moons of the planets in our solar system
- Parts of the outer ear
- Darwin was from the 19th century, the rest produced most of their work in the 17th century.
- Oxygen (forming 21% of the gas in the earth’s atmosphere; there are also trace amounts of neon, helium, methane, krypton and hydrogen, as well as water vapor.)
- Islands of the Galápagos Islands
- How genetically similar each animal is to a human
- They are all names given to B vitamins (thiamine is B1, riboflavin is B2, niacin is B3, pantothenic acid is B6, biotin is B7 and folic acid is B9, along with B6 and B12)
- Number of hearts
- Bajillion – the rest are real numbers (centillion is 10^303, decillion is 10^33 and googol 10^100).
The Solar System Quiz Questions
Did you know that Uranus actually rotates on its side? That there are mountains on Pluto? Or that Jupiter’s famous red spot is shrinking each year? Perhaps you did know these but what about the following 10 questions all about the striking solar system…?
1. What is the name of the Martian volcano that is three times the size of Mount Everest?
2. Mercury is the smallest planet in our solar system. What is the next smallest?
3. What is the hottest planet in our solar system?
4. What is the brightest planet in our sky?
5. Which planet in our solar system has the most moons, at 53?
6. What is the only planet not named after a Greek God or Goddess?
7. How long does it take the Moon to orbit the Earth?
8. Which specific spacecraft (or mission) took the first astronauts to the moon?
9. Which planet rotates fastest, completing one whole rotation in just 10 hours?
10. What does NASA stand for?
Read next: 100 history trivia questions and answers
The Solar System Quiz Answers
- Olympus Mons. It is 600 km wide and 21 km high
- Mars
- Venus, with a surface temperature of 450 degrees Celsius. It is not Mercury because it has no atmosphere to regulate its temperature.
- Venus
- Saturn. The moons’ names range from the simply named Pan to the Scrabbletastic Kiviuq and the less inspirational S/2007 S 3.
- Earth!
- 27 days
- Apollo 11
- Jupiter
- National Aeronautics and Space Administration
Did you know? One million earths could fit inside the sun.
Scientists Trivia Questions and Answers
What happens when a scientist tells a joke? There is no reaction…. 🤣
Puns aside, how much do you think your participants know about the renowned men and women who have made some of the world’s biggest scientific discoveries? Other than smelly overcoats and lots of crazed, snow-white hair, how much do you all know about the famous scientists through the centuries? Let’s test your knowledge in this round dedicated to scientist trivia:
1. Whose 1687 book Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica (or just the Principia) prescribed the role of gravity in how planets move through space and how objects on Earth travel through the air?
2. Referred to as the ‘Father of observational astronomy’ and ‘Father of modern physics’, who championed heliocentrism to the extent that an inquisition by the Catholic Church Inquisition found him “vehemently suspect of heresy” resulting in the rest of his life being under house arrest?
3. Named after a nineteenth century English physicist, what is the SI unit for energy?
4. Whose pea plant experiments established many of the rules of heredity?
5. Referred to as the ‘Father of Medicine’, who is said to have begun the practice of taking medical histories?
6. Who was the first person to win Nobel prizes in two different sciences?
7. Which scientist, who contrary to lore didn’t fail maths at school, developed his greatest insights not from careful experimental analysis, but by contemplating what would happen under particular circumstances, saying “I am enough of an artist to draw freely upon my imagination”?
8. De revolutionibus orbium coelestium (On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres), which began as a short, untitled, anonymous manuscript distributed to several friends, is the seminal work of which astronomer?
9. Whose contributions through her mastery of X-ray crystallography were crucial to arguably the greatest discovery of the 20th century, but did not win her the recognition she deserved?
10. Whose 1988 bestseller ranked second on a list of most quickly abandoned books, as determined by a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison?
Like science and Star Wars? Try out our Disney Quiz
Scientists Trivia Answers
- Isaac Newton. He was also made Master of the Mint and established the Gold Standard in Britain.
- Galileo Galilei
- Joule, named after James Prescott Joule
- Gregor Medel, therefore ushering in the age of modern genetics
- Hippocrates, to whom the Hippocratic Oath is generally attributed
- Marie Curie
- Albert Einstein
- Nicolaus Copernicus
- Rosalind Franklin (and her role in describing DNA’s double-helix structure)
- Stephen Hawking. A Brief History of Time sold over 25 million copies. According to the list, created in 2014 by Professor Jordan Ellenberg, the ‘unread’ book was Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century.
Human Biology Trivia Questions
It’s a marvel; a perfectly engineered piece of ‘machinery’ that sometimes defies description. It can only be the human body; that amazing construct that sees you living and breathing as you complete this quiz today. While this isn’t a full biology quiz, we had to include at least one round dedicated to it, with ten great human biology quiz questions below:
1. What name is given to the natural, internal process that regulates the sleep-wake cycle?
2. Where in the human body would the pinna be found?
3. Does a red blood cell survive longer or shorter than a month?
4. Which animal’s fingerprints so closely resemble a human’s that they are impossible to different?
5. To the nearest ten percent, what percentage of the human body is made up of water?
6. What are the four main human blood types?
7. True or false? Humans have the lowest ratio of brain weight to body weight (ie the most brain per kilo of body mass)
8. How many teeth should an adult male have?
9. True or false? Albert Einstein had a lighter than average brain.
10. Which side of the brain is more concerned with logic and reasoning, and also controls the other side?
Read next: Our epic biology trivia guide
Human Biology Trivia Answers
- Circadian rhythm
- The ear
- Longer – 120 days
- Koala
- 60%
- A, B, AB, O
- False. Dwarf monkeys, for instance, have as much as one gram of brain for every twenty seven grams of body, while humans have roughly one gram of brain for every forty four grams of body.
- 32
- True, at 2.71 pounds. Though it was shown to have a higher than average number of connections.
- The left side
Need a cheesy science joke? What is the fastest way to determine the sex of a chromosome? Pull down its genes.
Maths & Science Trivia Questions and Answers
Can your contestants tell a hexagon from a heptagon? Do they know all about algorithms? Well then they’ll love this round of ten questions all geared towards the more mathematically-minded:
1. In Einstein’s formula E=mc2, what is the name of the constant represented by c?
2. True or false? Sound travels faster in water than in air.
3. Of what metal is the American penny mostly made?
4. What is 1,000,000 bytes known as?
5. On a game show, you are told that behind one of three doors is a grand prize. After you have chosen a door, the all-knowing host opens a prize-less door, leaving two remaining. You have the option to swap doors. Should you?
6. A vector describes the movement between two points, quantifying which two aspects?
7. What multiple of eleven has the same sum of its two digits as the product of its two digits?
8. What integer is closest to the sum of Pi and e?
9. The golden ratio is represented by what Greek letter?
10. What scale, which goes from zero to fourteen, is ascertained logarithmically?
Need more quiz questions? Try our maths quiz questions
Maths & Science Trivia Answers
- Speed of light
- True
- Zinc (with a copper coating)
- One megabyte
- Yes! This is called the ‘Monty Hall problem’. If you stay with the first door, you have a 1/3 chance of winning, whereas if you swap you have a 2/3. Consider if you started with 100 doors, you chose one, and then the host closed 98: it is clear what to do then.
- Direction and magnitude/force
- 22
- 6 (3.142…. + 2.718…. = 5.859…)
- Phi / Φ (1.6180339…..)
- The pH scale.
Earth Trivia Questions
It’s the only astronomical object that we categorically know harbours life. A beauty that sits pretty in its position as the third planet from the sun. It’s time to test your know-how about our humble home, Planet Earth!
1. Which planet is second closest to earth?
2. The Earth is generally described as consisting of what three layers?
3. What is the circumference of the Earth, to the nearest 1,000?
4. What appears approximately 15 to 35 kilometers above Earth?
5. Which is the only planet to spin anticlockwise?
6. After nitrogen and oxygen, what is the third most abundant gas in the earth’s atmosphere?
7. Which planet is named after the Roman goddess of beauty and love?
8. The Raleigh scattering of sunlight results in which daily experience?
9. Which planet has the largest ocean?
10. What is the most plentiful metal found in the earth’s crust?
We think you’d like: Music trivia questions and answers
Earth Trivia Answers
- Venus
- The crust, mantle, and core
- 40,075 km / 24,901 miles
- The ozone layer
- Venus
- Argon
- Venus
- The sky appearing blue, as well as the yellowish to reddish hue of the low Sun.
- Jupiter, though it is made of metallic hydrogen.
- Aluminium
Weird Science Quiz Questions and Answers
Did you know that polar bears are nearly undetectable by infrared cameras (they are so good at conserving heat) or that cutesy babies have 100 bones more than adults, since many of their bones fuse together over time? These are just two of the almost infinite number of weird and wacky stats out there, the stuff that keeps us entertained when putting together quizzes like these.
So, for your enjoyment, this round is all in honour of strange scientific facts:
1. Studies show that in public toilets the cubicle with the fewest germs is which of the following: the first on the left, the first on the right, either further from the entrance, or any middle stall?
2. What is the SI unit for the amount of substance, a diarist who is particular about his age, an animal with a subterranean lifestyle and the colloquial name for a nevus?
3. According to astronauts, the moon smells like what chemical explosive?
4. What is a repetitive involuntary contraction (myoclonic jerk) of the diaphragm?
5. Of what is the American five cent coin mostly made?
6. With what do butterflies taste?
7. Which bodily process, the medical term for which comes from the Latinflatus but which has numerous slang versions, can continue after death?
8. Why is the Eiffel Tower taller in the summer?
9. How, in 2010, did University of Wyoming researchers create goats that expressed strands of silk in their milk?
10. Which 1985 American science fiction comedy centres around two nerdy teens who create the perfect dream woman from a computer?
Like these weird science trivia facts? Find more in our science pub quiz
Weird Science Quiz Answers
- The first on the left
- Mole
- Burnt gunpowder
- A hiccup. The American Charles Osborne hiccupped for 68 years straight, at a rate of about 40 per minute. They stopped a year before his death.
- Although nicknamed the nickel, it is comprised of 75% copper and only 25% nickel
- Their hind feet
- Flatulence, from the Latin meaning ‘a blowing, a breaking wind’. After death, the slow unclenching of muscles can release gases along with any further decomposition or products of continued bacterial efforts.
- It is 15cm taller simply because metal expands when heated.
- By splicing the spider silk creating gene into the genome of a goat. The university said the goats were normal in every other way.
- Weird Science
Inventors Trivia Questions and Answers
While some might say that Thomas Edison is the world’s most prolific inventor (and he did hold over 1,000 patents after all), the accolade is actually held by a little-known Australian man, Kia Silverbrook. Silverbrook holds over 4,700 patents, most of which are in the field of printing and digital paper.
Now that we’ve blown your mind with that ingenious fact, it’s worth using this second last stab at a quiz round to focus all on the fantastic inventors, those who have designed incredible creations and contraptions. Let’s see how you fare:
1. Described as the USA’s greatest inventor, which man, who generally had only three or four hours sleep a night, counted amongst his inventions something which contributed to reducing the amount of sleep humans get?
2. Which Founding Father of the United States invented the bifocal lenses?
3. With the oldest digital library commemorating his name, who invented the printing press?
4. James Naismith, a Canadian physical education instructor, invented what in 1891?
5. Whose 18th century discovery about cowpox lead to a successful global campaign by the World Health Organisation between 1958 and 1977 to eradicate Smallpox?
6. Which man, who claimed to have invented a ‘death ray’, developed coil circuits which first allowed for the transmission of power wirelessly?
7. Alfred Nobel, whose Peace Prize is arguably the world’s most famous award, ironically invented what?
8. Long before they were technically feasible, who invented the battle tank and the helicopter?
9. Which Frenchman invented the principles of vaccination?
10. Who, along with his team, invented HTML?
Read next: All the best sports trivia questions and answers
Inventors Trivia Answers
- Thomas Edison, who invented the lightbulb.
- Benjamin Franklin
- Johannes Gutenberg
- Basketball
- Edward Jenner showed that an infection with the relatively mild cowpox virus gave humans immunity to the deadly smallpox virus. This later lead to the concept of vaccinations and the later WHO campaign.
- Nikola Tesla
- Dynamite
- Leonardo da Vinci
- Louis Pasteur
- Sir Tim Berners-Lee. Although the internet began in 1969 in the Pentagon, Berners-Lee added the concept of hypertext to make recourse sharing more efficient, develop HTML, web servers and browsers, leading to the World Wide Web in 1989, which became public in 1991.
USA Science Knowledge Trivia Questions and Answers
For our last and final round of quiz questions on science, we wanted to try something a little bit different. Each year the National Science Foundation in the USA conducts a survey of the public, to see how much they understand about science and engineering.
We’ve got the ten questions asked in the last version below – do you think you can do better than the majority of the American population? And, perhaps for a few bonus points, can you guess whether more or less than 50% of those polled got it right?
1. True or False? The centre of the Earth is very hot.
2. True or False? It is the father’s gene that decides whether the baby is a boy or girl.
3. Which is correct? A. The Earth goes around the Sun. or B. The Sun goes around the Earth.
4. True or False? Electrons are smaller than atoms.
5. True or False? All radioactivity is manmade.
6. True or False? Lasers work by focusing sound waves.
7. True or False? The universe began with a huge explosion.
8. True or False? Antibiotics kill viruses as well as bacteria.
9. True or False? The continents have been moving their location for millions of years and will continue to move.
10. True or False? Human beings, as we know them today, developed from earlier species of animals.
USA Science Knowledge Trivia Answers
- True. 85% of people got this correct
- True. 59% were correct here.
- A. 73% got this correct.
- True. Only 48% of people knew this answer.
- False. 70% of people were correct.
- False, they concentrate light waves. 45% were right with this one.
- True, with a caveat that this is the best theory that we have. 39% of Americans chose ‘True’ as their answer.
- False. 51% of the sample knew this.
- True. 81% of the population were correct.
- True. 52% of Americans chose this answer.
And, just like that, your dive into great trivia about science is over. Did you enjoy these interesting science questions and answers, or did we miss any ‘sitters’ off the list? Give us a sign by dropping us a line, or feel free to post a comment below.
Want to save this for later? Why not pin it…
63 Shares