30 true or false quiz questions (with the reasoning)

True or false is the most forgiving round you can put in a quiz. Everyone can have a go, nobody has to admit they've never heard of the subject, and even a team that knows nothing scores about half. That makes it a good opener, especially for a crowd that doesn't know each other yet.

The trick is picking statements where the obvious answer is wrong often enough to keep teams honest. Here are 30 of them, sorted roughly from gentle to genuinely annoying, with the reasoning after each answer so you can settle arguments on the spot.

Easy warm-ups

1Bananas grow on trees.

Answer:False. The banana plant is a giant herb. What looks like a trunk is tightly packed leaf bases, which is why a banana "tree" can be knocked over by a strong wind.(click to reveal)

2Vatican City is the smallest country in the world.

Answer:True. It covers about 49 hectares, which is smaller than many city parks.(click to reveal)

3A tomato is botanically a fruit.

Answer:True. It develops from the flower and contains seeds, which is the botanical definition. Cooks have never cared, and neither did the US Supreme Court, which ruled in 1893 that tomatoes should be taxed as vegetables.(click to reveal)

4The Statue of Liberty was a gift from France to the United States.

Answer:True. It arrived in 1885 in 350 pieces.(click to reveal)

5Sound travels faster through water than through air.

Answer:True. Roughly four times faster, because the molecules are packed more closely together.(click to reveal)

6Peanuts are nuts.

Answer:False. They're legumes, in the same family as peas and beans, and they grow underground rather than on a plant above ground.(click to reveal)

7The flight recorder on an aircraft, commonly called the black box, is painted black.

Answer:False. It's bright orange, so searchers can spot it in wreckage or water.(click to reveal)

8Antarctica is classified as a desert.

Answer:True. A desert is defined by how little precipitation it gets, not by temperature, and parts of Antarctica get almost none.(click to reveal)

9Octopuses have three hearts.

Answer:True. Two pump blood through the gills and the third sends it round the rest of the body. That third one stops when the animal swims, which is part of why octopuses prefer crawling.(click to reveal)

10Humans have exactly five senses.

Answer:False. Balance, temperature, pain and the sense of where your limbs are all work through separate systems. Estimates of the real number range from nine to more than twenty, depending on how you count.(click to reveal)

Harder statements

11The Great Wall of China is the only man-made structure visible from space with the naked eye.

Answer:False. It isn't visible from orbit without help. NASA has addressed this one directly, and astronauts have said motorways and airports are far easier to pick out.(click to reveal)

12Goldfish have a memory span of about three seconds.

Answer:False. They can be trained to respond to signals and remember the training for months.(click to reveal)

13Napoleon Bonaparte was unusually short for his time.

Answer:False. He was around 5 feet 7 inches, which was average or slightly above for a Frenchman of the period. The confusion comes from French inches being longer than British ones, plus some very effective enemy propaganda.(click to reveal)

14Carrots significantly improve your night vision.

Answer:False. Severe vitamin A deficiency does harm night vision, so correcting it helps, but eating extra carrots won't give you better eyesight than you already have. The idea was pushed during the Second World War, partly to explain British pilots' success without mentioning radar.(click to reveal)

15The Canary Islands are named after the birds.

Answer:False. It runs the other way round. The islands took their name from dogs, from the Latin canis, and the birds were later named after the islands.(click to reveal)

16Lightning never strikes the same place twice.

Answer:False. Tall structures get hit repeatedly, and the Empire State Building is struck around twenty times a year.(click to reveal)

17Chameleons change colour mainly to blend in with their surroundings.

Answer:False. Colour change is mostly about communication, temperature regulation and mood. Camouflage is a side effect rather than the point.(click to reveal)

18Bats are blind.

Answer:False. All bat species can see, and some have excellent vision. Echolocation supplements their sight rather than replacing it.(click to reveal)

19Honey found in ancient Egyptian tombs was still edible.

Answer:True. Honey's low moisture and high acidity mean bacteria can't grow in it, so it keeps more or less indefinitely if sealed.(click to reveal)

20The Sahara is the largest desert on Earth.

Answer:False. Antarctica is considerably larger. The Sahara is the largest hot desert, which is where the confusion comes from.(click to reveal)

The properly tricky ones

21Sharks have existed for longer than trees.

Answer:True. Sharks go back around 450 million years, and the first trees appeared roughly 385 million years ago.(click to reveal)

22Cleopatra lived closer in time to the first Moon landing than to the building of the Great Pyramid of Giza.

Answer:True. The pyramid was already more than 2,000 years old when she was born, and she lived about 2,000 years before 1969.(click to reveal)

23Oxford University was teaching students before the Aztec Empire's capital was founded.

Answer:True. Teaching at Oxford is recorded from 1096, and Tenochtitlan was founded in 1325.(click to reveal)

24Mount Everest is the tallest mountain on Earth when measured from base to summit.

Answer:False. Measured that way, Mauna Kea in Hawaii wins comfortably, because most of it is underwater. Everest is the highest point above sea level, which is a different thing.(click to reveal)

25Australia is wider than the Moon is across.

Answer:True. Australia spans roughly 4,000 km east to west, and the Moon's diameter is about 3,475 km.(click to reveal)

26A day on Venus lasts longer than a year on Venus.

Answer:True. It takes about 243 Earth days to turn once on its axis and about 225 to orbit the Sun.(click to reveal)

27The shortest war in recorded history lasted less than an hour.

Answer:True. The Anglo-Zanzibar War of 27 August 1896 is usually given as 38 minutes.(click to reveal)

28Greenland is larger than Africa.

Answer:False. Africa is about fourteen times the size. Greenland looks enormous on a standard world map because the Mercator projection stretches land near the poles.(click to reveal)

29Nintendo was founded before the end of the Ottoman Empire.

Answer:True. The company started making playing cards in 1889, more than thirty years before the empire was dissolved.(click to reveal)

30The Hundred Years' War lasted exactly one hundred years.

Answer:False. It ran from 1337 to 1453, so 116 years, and it wasn't continuous fighting either.(click to reveal)

Running a true or false round

Keep it to ten statements. True or false is quick to answer, so a round of thirty would be over in six minutes and teams would stop taking it seriously.

Mix the answers up properly. If you've written seven trues and three falses, teams will spot the pattern by question six and start guessing accordingly. An even split in a scrambled order is harder to game.

Think about whether to penalise wrong answers. A straight point per correct answer means a team guessing at random still gets five out of ten, which can feel unsatisfying. Deducting a point for a wrong answer fixes that, but it also makes the round feel punishing. A middle option is to award two points for a correct answer and take one away for an incorrect one, so there's a reason to leave a statement blank if nobody has a clue.

The best statements are the ones where the popular belief is wrong. Most of the questions above that trip teams up are things people are quite sure they already know, which is exactly what makes them work.

If you want to mix this in with other formats, our quiz round ideas post has 20 more, and the general knowledge quiz questions set gives you a standard round to pair it with. Building the whole thing is easier in the quiz creator, which handles the answer sheets for you.