Easy
Video Games
Consoles, Classics & Code
The games and machines that built the biggest entertainment industry.
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Which company created the character Mario?
Entertainment & Sport
Film, music, games, sport and the things we do for fun.
Not everything has to be improving. This is the section for the things people actually spend their evenings and weekends on.
Film and television, music, comics and animation, video games, sport, and puzzles for their own sake. The questions are lighter, but they are researched to the same standard as everything else here — no made-up numbers, no half-remembered chart positions, and an explanation after every answer.
It is also the best section to play with other people. Most of these work as pub-quiz rounds, and the explanations settle the arguments.
Difficulty mix
New to this section? Start here
Records, Rings & Legends
The rules, records and moments the world actually watched.
10 easy
19 medium
4 hard
6–8 min each
Topics in Entertainment & Sport
Choose a subject
Music
8 quizzes · 80 questionsInstruments, composers and the songs everyone knows.
Film & TV
7 quizzes · 70 questionsCinema classics, cult hits and the small screen.
- World Cinema Beyond Hollywood Hard
- Television Through the Decades Medium
- How a Film Gets Made Easy
- The Golden Age of Cinema Medium
- How Television Actually Works Medium
- Directors and Their Signatures Medium
- The Big Screen & The Small One Easy
Sports
6 quizzes · 60 questionsRecords, legends and unforgettable moments in play.
- Sport, Science and the Body Medium
- The Numbers Behind Sport Easy
- The Games People Play Medium
- Olympic Feats and Firsts Medium
- The Rules of the Game Easy
- Records, Rings & Legends Easy
Comics & Animation
3 quizzes · 30 questionsDrawn worlds, from newspaper strips to feature films.
- Animation, Frame by Frame Medium
- The Language of Comics Medium
- Drawn Worlds Easy
Journalism & Media
3 quizzes · 30 questionsHow news gets made, checked and published.
- The Rules Reporters Work By Medium
- Scoops That Changed Things Hard
- How News Gets Made Medium
Puzzles & Logic
3 quizzes · 30 questionsGames of reasoning and the thinking behind them.
- Classic Puzzles and How They Work Medium
- Chance, Odds and Bad Intuition Hard
- Reasoning & Riddles Medium
Video Games
3 quizzes · 30 questionsConsoles, classics and the shorthand players use.
- Consoles, Classics & Code Easy
- Consoles and Their Generations Medium
- How Video Games Are Made Medium
Most played
Popular Entertainment & Sport quizzes
Medium
Sports
Sport, Science and the Body
Why a curveball curves, why records fall, and what altitude does to a race.
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A spinning ball curves in flight because of what?
Hard
Film & TV
World Cinema Beyond Hollywood
The national film industries and movements that shaped the medium elsewhere.
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Which country produces the most feature films per year?
Medium
Music
Instruments Around the World
The sitar, the koto, the djembe and the bagpipes — instruments beyond the orchestra.
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The sitar is most closely associated with which country?
Easy
Sports
The Numbers Behind Sport
Distances, dimensions and durations that are fixed by rule across every sport.
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How high is a basketball hoop in professional play?
Medium
Sports
The Games People Play
Where the world's sports came from, and how their rules got written down.
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Basketball was invented in 1891 by a teacher looking for what?
Medium
Puzzles & Logic
Classic Puzzles and How They Work
Hanoi, Konigsberg, magic squares and the structures hiding underneath famous puzzles.
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In the Tower of Hanoi, which rule must never be broken?
Hard
Puzzles & Logic
Chance, Odds and Bad Intuition
Coincidences, false positives and the places where reasoning about probability reliably fails.
Sample question
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The gambler's fallacy is the belief that what?
Medium
Film & TV
Television Through the Decades
How television was invented, paid for and scheduled, from spinning discs to the shape of the screen.
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Which Scottish engineer publicly demonstrated a working television system in London in 1926?
Easy
Film & TV
How a Film Gets Made
The jobs, the jargon and the order of work behind the credits that scroll past at the end.
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What is the director of photography responsible for?
Medium
Film & TV
The Golden Age of Cinema
Ten questions on the silent era, the arrival of sound and the studios that ran Hollywood.
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Which 1941 film was Orson Welles's first feature as a director?
Hard
Music
Composers and Their Works
Ten pieces of classical music matched to the people who wrote them, from Vivaldi to Ravel.
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Who wrote the set of four violin concertos known as The Four Seasons?
Medium
Music
The Story of Recorded Music
From tinfoil cylinders to the compact disc, with the genres that grew up alongside each new format.
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Who demonstrated the first machine that could both record sound and play it back, in 1877?
Medium
Music
Reading Music: Scales and Keys
Notation, intervals, key signatures and time signatures, explained through ten questions with no jargon left unexplained.
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How many semitones make up an octave in standard Western tuning?
Easy
Music
Instruments of the Orchestra
Ten questions on how the instruments of an orchestra are grouped and how they actually make their sound.
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Which section of a symphony orchestra normally contains the most players?
Medium
Journalism & Media
The Rules Reporters Work By
Embargoes, attribution, corrections and the difference between on the record and on background.
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If a source speaks "on background", what has usually been agreed?
From the Blog
Read more about Entertainment & Sport
12 min read
How animation tricks your eye
Persistence of vision is the wrong explanation and has been for a century. What actually makes still drawings move is apparent…
Read article 10 min readHow news gets decided
A bulletin holds about three thousand words and the world produces rather more than that. What survives the filter is shaped by…
Read article 10 min readWhy sporting records keep falling
Human biology has not changed in a century, but the record book keeps moving. Timing precision, surfaces, equipment, nutrition…
Read article
Questions
About Entertainment & Sport quizzes
How many Entertainment & Sport quizzes are there?
33 published quizzes across 7 topics, 330 questions in total. Every one is researched, written and checked by hand.
How difficult are they?
The mix here is 10 easy, 19 medium and 4 hard. Difficulty is about how obscure the answers are, not how fast you have to be — there is no timer on any quiz.
How long does one take?
About 7 minutes on average, ranging from 6 to 8. Playing every quiz in this section would take roughly 4 hours.
Do I need an account?
No. Every quiz is free and playable straight away. An optional free account only saves your scores across devices.
Do you explain the answers?
Yes — every question has a short explanation of why the right answer is right, shown the moment you answer, whether you got it or not.