General knowledge quiz questions and answers

34 free general knowledge questions with answers, split into easy, medium and hard. The round to open a quiz night with, pitched so every table scores.

Last reviewed 14 September 2026

How to use this round

General knowledge is the round to open a quiz night with, and its job is not to test anybody. Its job is that every table scores, because a table that gets two out of ten in the first round has already decided how their evening is going.

Take the easy band for round one and save the hard band for round three or a tie-break. Mixing all three difficulties into one round of ten is the standard way to do it: two that nearly everyone gets, six that split the room, two that only a couple of tables will manage.

Everything here is free to use. Read it through before the night rather than on it. The point of reading a round in advance is catching the question that does not suit your room.

Easy

For an opening round, a charity night, or any room with a wide age range. These are questions almost every table will get, and that is the point.

1
What is the capital city of Australia?
Answer: Canberra
2
How many sides does a hexagon have?
Answer: Six
3
What is the chemical symbol for gold?
Answer: Au
4
Which planet is known as the Red Planet?
Answer: Mars
5
How many players are on a football pitch for one team at kick-off?
Answer: Eleven
6
What is the largest ocean on Earth?
Answer: The Pacific
7
In which country would you find the Eiffel Tower?
Answer: France
8
How many colours are in a rainbow, traditionally?
Answer: Seven
9
What is the currency of Japan?
Answer: The yen
10
How many legs does a spider have?
Answer: Eight
11
What is the longest river in Africa?
Answer: The Nile
12
Which animal is known as the ship of the desert?
Answer: The camel

Medium

The body of a general knowledge round. Most tables will get some of these and no table will get all of them, which is what a round is supposed to do.

13
What is the smallest country in the world by area?
Answer: Vatican City
14
Which element has the atomic number 1?
Answer: Hydrogen
15
In Greek mythology, who was the god of the sea?
Answer: Poseidon
16
What is the hardest naturally occurring substance on Earth?
Answer: Diamond
17
How many strings does a standard violin have?
Answer: Four
18
Which country gifted the Statue of Liberty to the United States?
Answer: France
19
What is the study of fossils called?
Answer: Palaeontology
20
Which sea is the saltiest, the Dead Sea or the Red Sea?
Answer: The Dead Sea
21
What is the name of the fear of confined spaces?
Answer: Claustrophobia
22
In which year did the Berlin Wall fall?
Answer: 1989
23
What is the largest desert in the world?
Answer: The Antarctic Desert (the Sahara is the largest hot desert)
24
How many bones are there in the adult human body?
Answer: 206

Hard

For round three, a tie-break, or one or two dropped into an easier round. Difficult, but not obscure: every one of these is gettable by a table that thinks about it.

25
What is the only letter that does not appear in any US state name?
Answer: Q
26
What is the SI unit of electrical resistance?
Answer: The ohm
27
Which is the only mammal capable of true sustained flight?
Answer: The bat
28
In music, how many semitones are there in an octave?
Answer: Twelve
29
What does the acronym LASER stand for?
Answer: Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation
30
Which two countries share the longest international land border?
Answer: Canada and the United States
31
What is the term for a group of crows?
Answer: A murder
32
Which vitamin is produced by the human body when exposed to sunlight?
Answer: Vitamin D
33
What is the capital of Canada?
Answer: Ottawa
34
In heraldry, what colour is 'gules'?
Answer: Red

Building a round from this

Ten questions is the standard round. Take two from the easy band, six from medium and two from hard, in roughly that order, the easy ones first so the table is invested before it hits anything difficult.

Do not run all thirty-four as one round. Five hard questions in a row is not a challenging round, it is a round where every table scores two and the standings do not move.

If you run a quiz weekly, take ten from here and ten from another category rather than using this page twice. Variety across the night matters more than variety within a round.

A note on why these questions look the way they do

Every question on this page is about something that does not change. There are no questions about who currently holds a record, who is currently in office, or what the best-selling anything is this year.

That is deliberate, and it is the single most useful habit to copy if you write your own. The most common failure in a home-written pack is not a question that was too hard, it is one that was correct when it was written and quietly stopped being correct, and the host finds out in front of the room.

Put these in a pack

Custom packs take multiple-choice and true-or-false questions with your own points and timings, so a round you built from this page is there again next year.

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