41 questions with answers · tap one to see its answer
True or False Questions
True or false questions are the quickest trivia round there is, and these 41 come with a fun fact under every answer: some debunk a myth everyone has heard, and some sound wrong but are true. About half are true. Read a statement, let everyone vote with a thumb up or down, then tap to see who was right.
Every answer was checked against two independent sources on November 9, 2026.
True or false: Goldfish can only remember things for about three seconds.
Answer: False
In a 1994 study, goldfish learned to press a lever for food during the one hour each day that it worked.
Checked against researchportal.plymouth.ac.uk and Wikipedia
True or false: Lightning never strikes the same place twice.
Answer: False
Tall buildings are hit again and again; New York's Empire State Building is struck about 20 to 25 times a year.
Checked against weather.gov and esbnyc.com
True or false: Viking warriors wore horned helmets into battle.
Answer: False
No horned Viking battle helmet has ever been found; the look was popularized by 1800s costumes for Wagner's operas.
Checked against History.com and Wikipedia
True or false: Peanuts are a type of tree nut.
Answer: False
Peanuts are legumes, related to beans and peas, and their pods ripen underground.
Checked against foodallergy.org and Wikipedia
True or false: Humans have exactly five senses.
Answer: False
Besides sight, hearing, taste, smell and touch, we sense balance, temperature, pain and where our limbs are.
Checked against livescience.com and Wikipedia
True or false: Sound travels faster through water than through air.
Answer: True
In water, sound moves at about 1,500 meters per second, more than four times faster than in air.
Checked against dosits.org and Wikipedia
True or false: Albert Einstein failed math at school.
Answer: False
He excelled at math and had mastered calculus before he turned 15.
Checked against content.time.com and Wikipedia
True or false: Cracking your knuckles causes arthritis.
Answer: False
One doctor cracked the knuckles of only his left hand for over 60 years and found no arthritis in either hand.
Checked against improbable.com, Wikipedia and harvardhealth.org
True or false: You lose most of your body heat through your head.
Answer: False
Your head loses heat at about the same rate as any other uncovered part of your body.
Checked against sciencedaily.com and npr.org
True or false: People use only 10 percent of their brains.
Answer: False
Brain scans show that people use virtually all of the brain, just not every part at the same moment.
Checked against scientificamerican.com and Wikipedia
True or false: A mother bird will abandon a chick that has been touched by a human.
Answer: False
Parent birds do not reject young just because a person touched them, though disturbing a nest can still scare the adults away.
Checked against scientificamerican.com and Wikipedia
True or false: A bolt of lightning is hotter than the surface of the Sun.
Answer: True
Lightning can heat the air around it to about 30,000°C, roughly five times hotter than the Sun's surface.
Checked against weather.gov and Wikipedia
True or false: Eating sugar makes children hyperactive.
Answer: False
Careful studies in which neither parents nor children knew who got sugar found no effect on behavior.
Checked against sciencedaily.com and Wikipedia
True or false: Toilets and sinks drain in the opposite direction in the Southern Hemisphere.
Answer: False
Earth's spin is far too weak to steer water in a basin; the shape of the bowl and the flow decide the swirl.
Checked against scientificamerican.com and Wikipedia
True or false: Sharks have been around longer than trees.
Answer: True
Sharks date back more than 400 million years, while the first trees appeared around 385 million years ago.
Checked against Natural History Museum and Wikipedia
True or false: The Eiffel Tower gets slightly taller on hot summer days.
Answer: True
Heat makes its iron expand, so the tower grows a little in summer, and its sunny side expands more, making the top lean slightly away from the Sun.
Checked against flaglerlive.com and Wikipedia
True or false: Napoleon Bonaparte was unusually short for a man of his time.
Answer: False
He was about 1.68 meters (5 feet 6 inches) tall, roughly average for his day; longer French inches made his recorded height of 5 feet 2 sound short.
Checked against National Geographic, Wikipedia and History.com
True or false: Cleopatra lived closer in time to the first Moon landing than to the building of the Great Pyramid.
Answer: True
She died in 30 BCE, about 2,500 years after the Great Pyramid was built and about 2,000 years before Apollo 11.
Checked against History.com, History.com, Wikipedia and NASA
True or false: The University of Oxford is older than the Aztec Empire.
Answer: True
Oxford was already building its first university library around 1320, before the Aztecs founded Tenochtitlan in 1325; their empire came in 1428.
Checked against bodleian.ox.ac.uk, History.com and Wikipedia
True or false: Fortune cookies were invented in China.
Answer: False
They were popularized in California in the early 1900s and most likely grew out of a Japanese cracker.
Checked against History.com and Wikipedia
True or false: Different parts of the tongue are each in charge of a different taste.
Answer: False
The famous tongue map came from a misread 1901 study; every taste area can detect all the basic tastes.
Checked against Smithsonian Magazine and Wikipedia
True or false: Iceland has more of its land covered by ice than Greenland does.
Answer: False
About 80 percent of Greenland lies under an ice sheet, while glaciers cover only around 10 percent of Iceland.
Checked against nsidc.org, frontiersin.org and Wikipedia
True or false: Some kinds of bamboo can grow almost a meter in a single day.
Answer: True
Certain bamboo species can grow about 91 centimeters in 24 hours, among the fastest growth of any plant.
Checked against Guinness World Records and Wikipedia
True or false: Wombats produce cube-shaped poop.
Answer: True
The cubes take shape in the last stretch of the gut, and wombats use their droppings to mark their territory.
Checked against popsci.com and Wikipedia
True or false: Brazil shares a border with every other country in South America.
Answer: False
Brazil borders every South American country except Chile and Ecuador.
Checked against worldatlas.com and Wikipedia
True or false: Clouds float because they weigh almost nothing.
Answer: False
A typical puffy cumulus cloud holds around 500 tonnes of water, spread out as tiny droplets that fall very slowly.
Checked against USGS and livescience.com
True or false: An ostrich's eye is bigger than its brain.
Answer: True
At about 5 centimeters across, ostrich eyes are the largest of any land animal.
Checked against sydneyzoo.com, animals.sandiegozoo.org and Wikipedia
True or false: Glass is a slow-flowing liquid, which is why old windowpanes are thicker at the bottom.
Answer: False
Glass is an amorphous solid; old panes were uneven because of how they were made, and were often fitted thick edge down.
Checked against scientificamerican.com and Wikipedia
True or false: There are more trees on our planet than stars in the Milky Way galaxy.
Answer: True
A 2015 study counted about 3 trillion trees, while the Milky Way holds roughly 100 to 400 billion stars.
Checked against news.yale.edu, NASA and Wikipedia
True or false: Fully grown sunflowers face east.
Answer: True
Young sunflowers follow the Sun across the sky, but mature ones settle facing east, which warms them and draws more bees.
Checked against ucdavis.edu and Wikipedia
True or false: Bacteria in your body outnumber your own cells by about ten to one.
Answer: False
A 2016 study estimated about 38 trillion bacteria and 30 trillion human cells, much closer to one to one.
Checked against journals.plos.org, nature.com and Wikipedia
True or false: The dot over a lowercase i or j has its own name, the tittle.
Answer: True
Turkish has both a dotted and a dotless i, and they count as two separate letters.
Checked against Dictionary.com and Wikipedia