A bit of everything, mixed fresh every round.
About this quiz
This General Knowledge Quiz is the all-rounder. Each round mixes questions from across Quiz Ninja's categories, so a capital city can sit next to an Olympic record, a chemical element, a strange old currency or a famous composer. Some questions are classic quiz fare; others start from a curious fact and leave you to work out the rest.
You get 10 questions with 20 seconds for each, then a short fact that explains the answer. The mix is drawn fresh every round and puts questions you haven't seen yet first, so it makes a good quick warm-up and a fair test of how wide your trivia knowledge goes.
Try a few questions
Tap an answer to check it, or open the answer underneath.
Many residents of Coober Pedy in the Australian outback live where?
- In tents that move with the mines
- In converted shipping containers
- In homes dug underground
- In houses built on stilts over a salt lake
Answer: In homes dug underground
Did you know? In this opal-mining town, where summer temperatures can pass 45 °C, around half the population lives in 'dugouts' carved into the sandstone hillsides, which stay at a comfortable 23 °C or so all year. The town also has underground churches, hotels and a bookshop.
Wombat droppings are unusual because they are what?
- Cube shaped
- Hollow
- Perfectly spherical
- Bright blue
Answer: Cube shaped
Did you know? Varying stiffness along the intestine wall moulds the cubes, which then stay put when the animal stacks them on rocks to mark territory. The discovery of how it works won an Ig Nobel Prize.
How many species of flowering plant grow naturally on the continent of Antarctica?
- None at all
- One, a single hardy lichen
- Two, a grass and a pearlwort
- Around fifty, mostly on the Peninsula
Answer: Two, a grass and a pearlwort
Did you know? Antarctic hair grass and Antarctic pearlwort cling to a few ice-free patches on the Antarctic Peninsula and nearby islands, where summers only just scrape above freezing. Both are spreading fast as the peninsula warms, with surveys finding the hair grass growing five times faster than it did in the 1960s.
Southern Africa's Rhodesian Ridgeback was bred for one dangerous job on the hunt. What was it?
- Keeping a lion at bay for the hunters
- Digging warthogs out of their burrows
- Fetching ducks shot down over water
- Flushing guineafowl out of long grass
Answer: Keeping a lion at bay for the hunters
Did you know? Settlers crossed the ridged hunting dogs of the Khoikhoi with European breeds, and the dogs learned to dart in and out, harrying a lion without closing in until a hunter could shoot it. The breed's mark is a ridge of hair along the back that grows the opposite way to the rest of the coat.
Long before it came to mean the king himself, the Egyptian phrase that gave us the word 'pharaoh' referred to what?
- The double crown
- The sun's daily path
- The royal tomb
- The royal palace
Answer: The royal palace
Did you know? Per-aa means 'great house', and much as 'the Crown' can stand for a monarch, the palace's name came to mean the ruler inside it. The earliest certain use of it for the king himself is in a letter to Akhenaten, in the 14th century BC.
The Xinhai Revolution of 1911 overthrew which Chinese dynasty?
- Song
- Yuan
- Ming
- Qing
Answer: Qing
Did you know? The revolt began with an army uprising at Wuchang in October 1911. Sun Yat-sen became provisional president of the new Republic of China on 1 January 1912, and the six-year-old emperor Puyi abdicated that February, ending over 2,000 years of imperial rule.