Pub quiz questions with answers: 120 questions in six rounds

Coming up with a pub quiz takes an evening; writing the questions takes a week. The format is usually on paper within half an hour: six rounds, teams of five, someone behind the bar marking the answers. After that you need a hundred or so questions where exactly one answer is right and nobody's arguing about it at half past ten. Below are 120 questions with answers, divided into six rounds of twenty: geography, music, sport, history, film and TV, and the Netherlands. Each round has a mix of questions almost everyone knows and questions a team needs to confer over. You can use them as they stand.

How to use these six rounds

Twenty questions per round is more than you need for an evening, and that's deliberate. A round of twenty questions takes well over twenty minutes to read out, and attention drops. Pick ten or twelve per round and keep the rest in reserve. That gives you two things. You can adjust the level as you put the quiz together, and you have a reserve if the group wants another one after five rounds.

The questions in each round are sorted by difficulty, from the questions almost every team gets right to the questions only two of eight teams might get. That ordering is for choosing from, not for reading out in that order. Within the round itself, don't put the easy questions together: start with two that everyone knows, build up towards the middle, and put the two hardest at positions eight and nine. Make the last question of a round slightly easier again, so teams finish the round feeling good and start the next one in good spirits.

Everything about the set-up of the evening itself, meaning the structure, the sound, the judging and the prize-giving, is in the article on organising a pub quiz. I won't repeat that here. This piece is about the content: the questions, the level and the way you put them together into rounds that flow.

What makes a question unusable

Writing quiz questions almost always goes wrong in the same three ways, and in all three you only notice when the room starts grumbling.

The answer changes over time. Questions about population figures, records, who has the most titles or which film earned the most are right today and wrong in two years. If you reuse a list you made last year, this is the type of question that quietly breaks. Stick to facts that are fixed: capital cities, dates of events that are over, rules of games, line-ups of bands that no longer exist.

There are two defensible answers. Ask for the longest river in the Netherlands and you get three answers and a discussion about where exactly the Rhine ends. Ask for the smallest province and it depends on whether you count water. Questions like this sound good and cost you ten minutes at the bar. Read every question back with this thought in mind: could someone reasonably fill in something else here? If so, the question goes and another one comes in.

The question can't be answered, only guessed. A question where nobody can reason their way to the answer feels unfair, even if it's factually correct. Asking for the birth year of an obscure composer with nothing to go on produces only a guess. A hard question is one where a team gets some way with discussion, for example because one person knows the country and someone else knows the city.

The questions below have been checked on those three points. There are no superlatives, no records, no numbers that grow, and no questions where a second answer is defensible. For the three questions where a Dutch and an English name exist side by side, both are in the answer, so the judge doesn't have to choose.

Round 1: geography

Geography is the most neutral round there is. Age makes little difference, education less than people think, and almost everyone can come up with something for a country or a city. Put this round first: it draws the whole room into the game before music or film push half of them to the sidelines.

A practical point when reading out: spell foreign place names out loud once and then write them on a flip chart or a screen. Hearing Timbuktu and writing Timbuktu are two different things, and you don't want a team missing a point on spelling.

1. What is the capital of Portugal? Answer: Lisbon
2. In which country is the city of Marrakesh? Answer: Morocco
3. Which river flows through Cairo? Answer: the Nile
4. On which continent is Suriname? Answer: South America
5. Which country is Reykjavik the capital of? Answer: Iceland
6. How many countries border the Netherlands? Answer: two, Germany and Belgium
7. In which country is Mount Fuji? Answer: Japan
8. Which mountain range lies between Spain and France? Answer: the Pyrenees
9. In which ocean does Madagascar lie? Answer: the Indian Ocean
10. What is the capital of Canada? Answer: Ottawa
11. What is the capital of Australia? Answer: Canberra
12. What is the strait between Spain and Morocco called? Answer: the Strait of Gibraltar
13. What is the capital of New Zealand? Answer: Wellington
14. In which US state is the Grand Canyon? Answer: Arizona
15. Which sea lies between Italy and Croatia? Answer: the Adriatic Sea
16. Which two countries share the island of Hispaniola? Answer: Haiti and the Dominican Republic
17. What is the capital of Morocco? Answer: Rabat
18. In which country is the city of Timbuktu? Answer: Mali
19. Which river forms a large part of the border between the United States and Mexico? Answer: the Rio Grande
20. Which Italian island lies close to the toe of the boot? Answer: Sicily

Round 2: music

Music is the round with the greatest risk of a lopsided group. A department with ages from twenty-four to sixty-four has no shared musical knowledge, and a round that's only about one period silences half the room. The questions below are therefore mixed: a few bands everyone knows, a few classical composers, some knowledge of instruments and three Dutch questions.

If you can play sound, make this round the clips round. Ten snippets of fifteen seconds, and the question is who's playing. That works better than reading out, and it's also the round where people start singing along, which is exactly the moment the evening tips from a quiz into a night out. Keep the clips short and play each one twice in a row, so teams don't have to ask you to play it again.

1. Which city is the band The Beatles from? Answer: Liverpool
2. Which band released Bohemian Rhapsody? Answer: Queen
3. Which country is the group ABBA from? Answer: Sweden
4. Which instrument did Jimi Hendrix play? Answer: the guitar
5. What is the name of U2's singer? Answer: Bono
6. Which instrument did Louis Armstrong play? Answer: the trumpet
7. How many keys does a standard piano have? Answer: eighty-eight
8. How many strings does a standard bass guitar have? Answer: four
9. Which Dutch band had a worldwide hit with Radar Love? Answer: Golden Earring
10. Which band released the album The Dark Side of the Moon? Answer: Pink Floyd
11. Who was the singer of Nirvana? Answer: Kurt Cobain
12. How many musicians make up a string quartet? Answer: four
13. What does the musical term forte mean? Answer: loud, strong
14. Who composed the opera The Magic Flute? Answer: Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
15. Who composed the symphony that includes the Ode to Joy? Answer: Ludwig van Beethoven
16. Which band did Slash play guitar for on the album Appetite for Destruction? Answer: Guns N' Roses
17. Which Dutch singer wrote and sang Mag ik dan bij jou? Answer: Claudia de Breij
18. In which Austrian city was Mozart born? Answer: Salzburg
19. Which Dutch band topped the American charts in 1970 with Venus? Answer: Shocking Blue
20. Which Dutch group won the Eurovision Song Contest in 1975? Answer: Teach-In

Round 3: sport

Sports questions go off faster than any other category, because everything to do with results and records changes every season. The solution is to build the round on rules and numbers rather than on performance. How many players, how many points, how long does it last, what's the equipment called. That kind of question stays good for years and can also be reasoned out by non-sporty people.

The four questions about years and host countries at the bottom are the exception, and they're allowed because they're about events that are over. A question about the 1974 World Cup will be exactly the same in ten years.

1. How many players from one team are on the pitch in football? Answer: eleven
2. How many rings does the Olympic symbol have? Answer: five
3. In which sport do you use a shuttlecock? Answer: badminton
4. Which sport do you play with a puck? Answer: ice hockey
5. How many pins are set up in ten-pin bowling at the start of a turn? Answer: ten
6. Which sport is played at Wimbledon? Answer: tennis
7. How many players from one team are on the court in basketball? Answer: five
8. How many players from one team are on the court in volleyball? Answer: six
9. How many holes does a full golf course have? Answer: eighteen
10. How many metres from the goal line is the penalty spot in football? Answer: eleven metres
11. How many points does a touchdown score in American football? Answer: six
12. How long is a lane in an Olympic swimming pool? Answer: fifty metres
13. How many players from one team are in the water in water polo? Answer: seven
14. What is a tennis player's score after winning one point in a game? Answer: fifteen
15. In which year did the Netherlands become European football champions? Answer: 1988
16. In which city were the 1928 Summer Olympics held? Answer: Amsterdam
17. Which country hosted the 1974 football World Cup? Answer: West Germany
18. How many balls are on the table at the start of a game of snooker? Answer: twenty-two
19. How many minutes does a rugby union match last, excluding extra time? Answer: eighty
20. How many seconds does a team have to take a shot under FIBA rules in basketball? Answer: twenty-four

Round 4: history

History is the round in which you can steer the level most precisely, because years can be dosed so well. If you ask the year the Second World War began, everyone has it. If you ask the year of the Battle of Waterloo, two teams are left. Same category, completely different level, so while putting the round together you can adjust exactly how sharp it gets.

Agree in advance how you'll handle near-miss years. The fairest rule is: the year must be exactly right, and there's no half point for being a year out. That stops the judges negotiating over 1814 and 1815 during the break. Say that rule out loud before the round starts, not after.

1. In which year did the Second World War begin? Answer: 1939
2. In which year was the Netherlands liberated? Answer: 1945
3. Who was the first person on the moon? Answer: Neil Armstrong
4. What was the name of the ship that sank in 1912 on its maiden voyage? Answer: the Titanic
5. Which country was Nelson Mandela president of? Answer: South Africa
6. Who wrote the diary that became known in Dutch as Het Achterhuis? Answer: Anne Frank
7. In which year did the Berlin Wall fall? Answer: 1989
8. In which year did the first person set foot on the moon? Answer: 1969
9. Which French emperor lost the Battle of Waterloo? Answer: Napoleon Bonaparte
10. Which American president was assassinated in Dallas in 1963? Answer: John F. Kennedy
11. In which year was the euro introduced as cash in the Netherlands? Answer: 2002
12. Which disaster hit Zeeland, South Holland and West Brabant in 1953? Answer: the North Sea flood (the Watersnoodramp)
13. Which building in Rome was used for gladiator fights? Answer: the Colosseum
14. Which war ended with the armistice of 11 November 1918? Answer: the First World War
15. Which city was buried in the year 79 by an eruption of Vesuvius? Answer: Pompeii
16. In which year was Nelson Mandela released? Answer: 1990
17. In which year was the American Declaration of Independence signed? Answer: 1776
18. In which year did the Battle of Waterloo take place? Answer: 1815
19. Who was the first emperor of the Roman Empire? Answer: Augustus
20. Which peace treaty of 1648 ended the Eighty Years' War? Answer: the Peace of Münster

Round 5: film and TV

This is the round with the most laughter and the most lopsided scores. In almost every team there's one person who knows everything about films, and they score the whole round on their own. That's no problem, as long as the round isn't decisive for the final standings. So don't make film and TV the last round, and don't give it double points.

The questions below are about directors, actors, characters and fixed facts from film. That's deliberate, because they're the only film facts that don't shift. Questions about box office takings, viewing figures or how many instalments a series has break within a few years because another film gets added.

1. In which film does the character Jack Dawson appear? Answer: Titanic
2. Which actor played Jack Sparrow in Pirates of the Caribbean? Answer: Johnny Depp
3. Which film series does the line May the Force be with you come from? Answer: Star Wars
4. Which actor played the lead in Forrest Gump? Answer: Tom Hanks
5. In which city is the series Friends set? Answer: New York
6. What is the name of the lion who becomes king in The Lion King? Answer: Simba
7. Who directed the 1975 film Jaws? Answer: Steven Spielberg
8. Which animation studio made Toy Story? Answer: Pixar
9. Who directed Pulp Fiction? Answer: Quentin Tarantino
10. In which film does Russell Crowe play the Roman general Maximus? Answer: Gladiator
11. What is the wizarding school in the Harry Potter films called? Answer: Hogwarts, in Dutch Zweinstein
12. Which television series is about chemistry teacher Walter White? Answer: Breaking Bad
13. What is Captain Kirk's spaceship called in Star Trek? Answer: the USS Enterprise
14. What is the hobbit who takes the One Ring to Mordor called? Answer: Frodo Baggins, in Dutch Frodo Balings
15. Which Dutch film by Paul Verhoeven from 1977 is about the resistance? Answer: Soldaat van Oranje (Soldier of Orange)
16. Which actor played Vito Corleone in the 1972 film The Godfather? Answer: Marlon Brando
17. Which actor played James Bond in Dr. No (1962)? Answer: Sean Connery
18. Which Dutch actor played Roy Batty in Blade Runner? Answer: Rutger Hauer
19. Which 1939 film does the closing line Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn come from? Answer: Gone with the Wind
20. What is the island called where the first Jurassic Park film is set? Answer: Isla Nublar

Round 6: the Netherlands

The Netherlands round does something the other rounds can't: almost everyone has a hook for every question, even if the answer doesn't come straight away. Someone's been to Leeuwarden, someone has family in Limburg, someone knows the Afsluitdijk because they drive over it every summer. So this round gets the most discussion, and discussion is what you want.

Also use this round as a bridge to a round of your own about the company or club. Two questions about the province you're in, then three about the town, then on to questions about your own building, the first product or the year someone joined. That transition feels logical and gets the most laughs of the whole round. Do ask the people concerned in advance whether they're fine with it, and make sure the answers can be checked, for example from an anniversary book or an old newsletter rather than from someone's memory.

1. In which province is Enschede? Answer: Overijssel
2. How many provinces does the Netherlands have? Answer: twelve
3. What colours does the Dutch flag have, from top to bottom? Answer: red, white and blue
4. What is the Dutch national anthem called? Answer: the Wilhelmus
5. In which city is the Rijksmuseum? Answer: Amsterdam
6. Which Dutch painter made The Night Watch? Answer: Rembrandt van Rijn
7. Which river flows through Maastricht? Answer: the Maas (Meuse)
8. What is the capital of the province of Friesland? Answer: Leeuwarden
9. What is the capital of the province of Gelderland? Answer: Arnhem
10. What is the capital of the province of Limburg? Answer: Maastricht
11. In which city is the Erasmus Bridge? Answer: Rotterdam
12. Which dyke connects North Holland with Friesland? Answer: the Afsluitdijk
13. Which Dutch city is known as the City of Light? Answer: Eindhoven
14. In which city is the Dom Tower? Answer: Utrecht
15. In which province is De Hoge Veluwe National Park? Answer: Gelderland
16. Which Wadden island belongs to the province of North Holland? Answer: Texel
17. What is the name of the highest point in the European Netherlands? Answer: the Vaalserberg
18. Which province was established on 1 January 1986? Answer: Flevoland
19. What is the name of the storm surge barrier in the Oosterschelde that opened in 1986? Answer: the Oosterscheldekering
20. What is Enschede called in the Twente dialect? Answer: Eanske

Points, answer sheets and marking

One point per correct answer, and nothing more. Every refinement you come up with costs time at the marking table and adds nothing in tension. There are two exceptions that do work, and you announce them out loud.

• One joker round. Each team may nominate one round in advance in which the points count double. This has to happen before the round starts, not after. It keeps teams that are behind in the game until the end and costs you nothing.
• A tiebreaker question at the end. A question with a number as the answer that nobody knows exactly, for example how many pages a particular book has. You only use it if the final scores are level. Without this question you end up drawing lots, and that's a weak ending.

You make the answer sheet per round, not per evening. One sheet per team per round, with the team name at the top, numbered lines and room for the total at the bottom. Collect the sheets after every round and don't let teams mark each other's sheets, even if that looks quicker. When teams swap sheets there's a discussion every time about how strict the neighbour was, and that discussion takes longer than marking them yourself.

Make sure the judges have an answer sheet with the correct answer written out exactly. That sounds obvious and it often goes wrong: the quizmaster knows the answers and is behind the microphone, while the person marking has to guess whether Zweinstein is also right when the sheet says Hogwarts. Write those alternatives down and nobody has to confer. Leave spelling mistakes alone: it's the answer that counts, not the spelling.

Allow five minutes of marking per round with eight teams, and read out the standings after every two rounds rather than after every round. Starting with last place and ending with first works best and gives the leading team a moment.

Matching the level to the group in the room

The rule of thumb that holds up in practice: aim for an average team getting seven or eight out of ten questions right per round. That keeps it fun without it feeling easy. If you're consistently at four or five, the energy drops and teams drift off to the bar. If you're at nine or ten, there's no difference between the teams any more and the final result is decided by the tiebreaker.

A few things you adjust for each group. For a mixed-age group, take out questions tied to a single period and bring in geography and the Netherlands instead. For a society or sports club, you can make the sport round harder than described above and the music round lighter. For an international team, drop the Netherlands round or turn it into questions about the countries your colleagues come from, which usually works better than you'd expect.

What you should never do is adjust the level halfway through the evening. If round two turns out to have been too hard, the temptation is to make round three easier, but then the final scores can't be compared. It's better to keep one extra round up your sleeve at a different level and use it in place of a planned round.

Five things that slow a quiz night down

1. Twenty questions in one round. After question twelve attention is gone and teams start talking about something else. Keep it to ten or twelve questions per round, then marking and the standings.
2. Marking while the room sits waiting. Put two people on marking and let the quizmaster do something else during those five minutes: read out an interim score, ask a bonus question, make an announcement. Silence at the marking table is the longest five minutes of the evening.
3. Reading every question three times. Twice is enough, and the second time more slowly. If you can, also put the question on a screen, so nobody has to shout that they didn't hear it.
4. A question that causes a debate. The one question where two answers are correct costs you ten minutes and sours the mood among the teams that didn't get the point. Check your questions beforehand and drop the question if in doubt.
5. No tiebreaker question. With eight teams and six rounds, two teams almost always finish level. Without a tiebreaker you have to draw lots, and an evening that ends in a lottery feels undecided.

A running order for two hours

• Arrival and team selection: fifteen minutes. Teams of four to six choose their own name, and the answer sheets are handed out.
• Explanation: three minutes. How many rounds, one point per answer, the joker round, and when the break is.
• Round 1, geography, ten questions: twelve minutes, plus five minutes of marking.
• Round 2, music with clips, ten questions: fifteen minutes, plus five minutes of marking. Read out the standings.
• Round 3, sport, ten questions: twelve minutes, plus five minutes of marking.
• Break: fifteen minutes. This is the moment to put the standings on a flip chart.
• Round 4, film and TV, ten questions: twelve minutes, plus five minutes of marking.
• Round 5, about the group itself, eight questions: fifteen minutes, including the laughter. This is the round the evening is remembered for.
• Round 6, the Netherlands, ten questions: twelve minutes, plus the tiebreaker question.
• Final scores and prize-giving: ten minutes.

That comes to fifty-eight questions plus a tiebreaker, and with arrival and the break it fits into a little over two hours. Put the round about the group in fifth place and not at the end: after that round the room is at its loosest, and then you want one more regular round to close the standings seriously.

Run it yourself or let us do it

A pub quiz is easy to do yourself, and of all the game formats it's the cheapest to set up on your own. You need a microphone, answer sheets, pens and someone who dares to host. You can use the questions above straight away, so the work is in the round about the group and in putting it all together.

Allow four to six hours of preparation if you take the round about the group seriously, because for that you'll need to call or email a few people and check the answers. On the evening itself you also need two people who aren't playing: one behind the microphone and one marking. That second point is where it usually falls down, because the person who makes the quiz is almost always someone who would have liked to play it.

Sound is another tipping point. Up to about thirty people in a pub you can manage with a voice and a small amplifier. Above forty you need a proper set, and as soon as you start working with music clips or visuals, you also need a laptop, a screen and someone to operate them. At that point you're building an evening rather than writing a quiz.

If you have us run it, we bring the questions, the answer sheets, the sound and the presentation to your venue, anywhere in the Netherlands. We come up with and build everything ourselves, so a round about your own company is included. A compact quiz starts at €195 for the whole group, from about six to sixty participants. A more extensive programme with visuals, several game formats and a round about your own group starts at €550, depending on group size. On the page about the pub quiz you can read how we put that together, and via the quote page and you'll hear within one working day what it will cost for your group.

What you get from this

The 120 questions above are enough for two full evenings. Take ten or twelve per round, mix the difficulty within the round rather than between rounds, and keep the rest in reserve. One point per correct answer, one joker round, and a tiebreaker question at the end.

Above all, put your preparation time into one round about your own company or club. That's the part you can't copy from anywhere else and the part the evening is remembered for. And put two people who aren't playing in charge of running it, because a quizmaster who also marks turns every break into a quarter of an hour.

If you want more game formats for the same evening, take a look at the overview of activities.