Quiz questions for kids make a perfect family night, a livelier lesson or a fun birthday party game. Below are 50 general knowledge questions with the answer right after each one, grouped by topic: animals, nature and the planet, the human body, space, the world and its countries, numbers and colors. Every answer is a fact you can check in any encyclopedia. They work best from age 5 or 6, and for younger kids you can simply offer two answers to choose from.

Animal quiz questions

Start here: animals get every kid talking. If your crew loves this round, read our dog facts for kids together afterwards.

How many legs does a spider have? Answer: eight. That’s why a spider is not an insect.
How many legs does an insect, like an ant or a bee, have? Answer: six.
What is the biggest animal on the planet? Answer: the blue whale. It lives in the ocean and it’s a mammal, not a fish.
What is the fastest land animal? Answer: the cheetah. It’s the champion of short sprints.
What is the tallest animal in the world? Answer: the giraffe.
Which is the only mammal that can truly fly by flapping its wings? Answer: the bat.
How many hearts does an octopus have? Answer: three.
What does a caterpillar turn into when it grows up? Answer: a butterfly or a moth.
Which black and white seabird with a colorful beak nests in burrows on North Atlantic clifftops? Answer: the puffin. Iceland is home to one of the biggest puffin colonies in the world.
Where does the Siberian husky breed come from? Answer: Siberia, in northeastern Russia, where the Chukchi people raised these dogs to pull sleds across the snow. Pigúiça, the heroine of the book Dogavios, is a blue-eyed husky puppy.

Nature and planet quiz questions

What is the largest ocean in the world? Answer: the Pacific Ocean.
What is the highest mountain in the world above sea level? Answer: Mount Everest, about 8,849 meters tall, on the border between Nepal and China.
What do we call a mountain that can throw out lava, ash and smoke? Answer: a volcano.
What do we call a hot spring that shoots water out of the ground every so often? Answer: a geyser. The word comes from Geysir, a famous geyser in Iceland.
At what temperature does water freeze? Answer: 0 °C, which is 32 °F.
What is the largest hot desert in the world? Answer: the Sahara, in North Africa.
What is the largest tropical rainforest in the world? Answer: the Amazon rainforest, in South America.
What is the name of the process plants use to make their own food from sunlight? Answer: photosynthesis.
Which gas do plants release into the air that we need to breathe? Answer: oxygen.

Human body quiz questions

How many baby teeth does a child usually have? Answer: 20.
How many bones are in an adult’s body? Answer: 206. Babies are born with more, and some fuse together as they grow.
Which organ pumps blood around the whole body? Answer: the heart.
What is the largest organ of the human body? Answer: the skin.
How many lungs do we have? Answer: two.
What is the longest bone in the body? Answer: the femur, the thigh bone.
Where is the smallest bone in the body? Answer: inside the ear. It’s called the stapes, or stirrup.
What are the five senses? Answer: sight, hearing, smell, taste and touch.

Space quiz questions

What is the closest star to Earth? Answer: the Sun.
How many planets are in the Solar System? Answer: eight.
What is the biggest planet in the Solar System? Answer: Jupiter.
Which planet is known as the red planet? Answer: Mars.
Which planet is famous for its huge rings? Answer: Saturn.
How long does Earth take to travel all the way around the Sun? Answer: about one year, a little over 365 days.
Who was the first person to walk on the Moon? Answer: astronaut Neil Armstrong, in 1969.
What are the colorful lights that dance in the sky near the North Pole called? Answer: the northern lights, or aurora borealis. They appear when particles from the Sun hit the air high above us. In Iceland you can see them on dark, clear nights.

World and countries quiz questions

What is the biggest country in the world by area? Answer: Russia.
What is the coldest continent on the planet? Answer: Antarctica.
What is the capital of Iceland? Answer: Reykjavík.
In which country are the famous pyramids of Giza? Answer: Egypt.
In which city is the Eiffel Tower? Answer: Paris, in France.
Which country is shaped like a boot on the map? Answer: Italy.
Which country is famous for kangaroos and koalas? Answer: Australia.
In which country is the Great Wall? Answer: China.

Numbers and colors quiz questions

How many sides does a triangle have? Answer: three.
How many sides does a hexagon have? Answer: six, just like the little cells in a honeycomb.
How many colors are in the rainbow on the traditional list? Answer: seven, which are red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo and violet.
What color do you get when you mix blue paint with yellow paint? Answer: green.
And if you mix red paint with white paint? Answer: pink.
How many minutes are in an hour? Answer: 60.
How many days are in a leap year? Answer: 366. The extra day is February 29.

How to run the quiz at home, at school or at a party

Split everyone into small teams of two to four and mix the ages. One adult reads the questions and keeps score: one point for each right answer.

Play in rounds with one question from each topic. That way nobody gets stuck on the subject they know least, and the scores stay close until the end.

Give each team about 30 seconds to talk it over before answering. For little ones, read the question with two options, like «six legs or eight?».

If nobody gets it, share the answer along with the fun fact. The surprise is what makes kids remember it later.

At the end, the winning team picks the prize. A free idea: a round of Pigúiça’s free game, which runs in the browser with no sign-up and no ads.

Frequently asked questions

What is the best age for a general knowledge quiz?

From about 5 or 6, kids can play on their own. Before that, it works well in pairs with an adult and two answer options to pick from.

How many questions should I use at a kids’ party?

Around 15 to 20 usually fill a round of about 20 minutes, before the group gets tired. Save the rest for next time.

Can I use these questions in the classroom?

Yes. The topics line up with what school covers in science and geography, and every answer is a fact that’s easy to check in a book or encyclopedia.

Quiz questions for kids: 50 with answers

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