• 95 questions

11th Grade Trivia Questions

Junior-year trivia on US history, Algebra II, chemistry and American literature, with a reason after every answer.

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What were the shantytowns built by the homeless during the Great Depression called?

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Unofficial practice questions, not affiliated with any school, exam board or quiz show. Bank checked October 15, 2026.

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All 95 questions with answers

US history 23

  • The 'three C's' of Theodore Roosevelt's Square Deal were conservation of natural resources, corporate law and what else? Answer: Consumer protection. Source: Wikipedia: Square Deal
  • The Bonus Army that gathered in Washington, D.C., in mid-1932 demanded early cash payment of certificates that had been awarded to the veterans of which war? Answer: World War I. Source: Wikipedia: Bonus Army
  • The Embargo Act of 1807 was an attempt to make Britain and France stop interfering with American merchant shipping during which wars? Answer: The Napoleonic Wars. Source: Wikipedia: Embargo Act of 1807
  • The Fair Deal is the name for the domestic agenda of which president, who set out its proposals in his State of the Union Address of January 1949? Answer: Harry S. Truman. Source: Wikipedia: Fair Deal
  • Franklin D. Roosevelt's 'court-packing plan' of 1937 would have let the president appoint additional justices to the Supreme Court, up to a maximum of how many? Answer: 6. Source: Wikipedia: Judicial Procedures Reform Bill of 1937
  • The Good Neighbor policy of Franklin D. Roosevelt's administration rested on a principle of non-intervention in the affairs of which region? Answer: Latin America. Source: Wikipedia: Good Neighbor policy
  • In which two states did the outpouring of religious revival known as the Second Great Awakening begin, in the 1790s and early 1800s? Answer: Kentucky and Tennessee. Source: Wikipedia: Second Great Awakening
  • Journalists of the early 1900s who took on corporate monopolies and political machines were given which name, taken from a character in John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress? Answer: Muckrakers. Source: Wikipedia: Muckraker
  • The National Labor Relations Act of 1935, also known as the Wagner Act, guarantees employees in the private sector the right to do what? Answer: Organize into trade unions. Source: Wikipedia: National Labor Relations Act of 1935
  • The Pendleton Civil Service Reform Act of 1883 requires most positions in the federal government to be awarded on which basis? Answer: Merit. Source: Wikipedia: Pendleton Civil Service Reform Act
  • The Platt Amendment of 1901, enacted after the Spanish–American War, defined the relationship between the United States and which country? Answer: Cuba. Source: Wikipedia: Platt Amendment
  • The Roosevelt Corollary, set out by Theodore Roosevelt in his State of the Union Address of 1904, was an addition to which earlier statement of American foreign policy? Answer: The Monroe Doctrine. Source: Wikipedia: Roosevelt Corollary
  • The states that signed the Kellogg–Briand Pact of 1928, also called the Pact of Paris, promised not to use what to resolve their disputes? Answer: War. Source: Wikipedia: Kellogg–Briand Pact
  • 'Substituting dollars for bullets' was how which president summed up his policy of dollar diplomacy in a message to Congress in December 1912? Answer: William Howard Taft. Source: Wikipedia: Dollar diplomacy
  • The Taft–Hartley Act of 1947, which Congress enacted over a presidential veto, restricts the activities and power of what? Answer: Labor unions. Source: Wikipedia: Taft–Hartley Act
  • What did the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906 require to be placed on the label of a drug's packaging? Answer: Its active ingredients. Source: Wikipedia: Pure Food and Drug Act
  • What were the shantytowns built by the homeless during the Great Depression called? Answer: Hoovervilles. Source: Wikipedia: Hooverville
  • Which industry did the Interstate Commerce Act of 1887 make the first to be subject to federal regulation by a regulatory body? Answer: Railroads. Source: Wikipedia: Interstate Commerce Act of 1887
  • Which law, passed by Congress in 1890 and named for the senator who was its principal author, prohibits unfair monopolies? Answer: The Sherman Antitrust Act. Source: Wikipedia: Sherman Antitrust Act
  • Which Secretary of State wrote the Open Door Note of September 1899, which asked the powers to keep China open to trade with all countries on an equal basis? Answer: John Hay. Source: Wikipedia: Open Door Policy
  • Who secretly wrote the Kentucky Resolutions of 1798, which held that the Alien and Sedition Acts were unconstitutional, while he was vice president? Answer: Thomas Jefferson. Source: Wikipedia: Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions
  • The Wilmot Proviso of 1846, which passed the House and failed in the Senate, was a proposal to ban slavery in territory acquired from which country? Answer: Mexico. Source: Wikipedia: Wilmot Proviso
  • Yellow journalism, the use of eye-catching headlines and sensationalized exaggerations to raise sales, emerged from a competition for readers between two newspapers in which city in the 1890s? Answer: New York City. Source: Wikipedia: Yellow journalism

Algebra II and trigonometry 23

  • A complex number has the form a + bi, where a and b are real numbers and i is the imaginary unit. What is a called? Answer: The real part. Source: Wikipedia: Complex number
  • An even function has f(−x) = f(x) for every x in its domain. Its graph is symmetric with respect to what? Answer: The y-axis. Source: Wikipedia: Even and odd functions
  • By the factor theorem, x − a is a factor of a polynomial f(x) if and only if what is true? Answer: f(a) = 0. Source: Wikipedia: Factor theorem
  • By the fundamental theorem of algebra, how many complex roots, counted with multiplicity, does a polynomial of degree 5 have? Answer: 5. Source: Wikipedia: Fundamental theorem of algebra
  • By Vieta's formulas, what is the sum of the two roots of the quadratic polynomial x² + bx + c? Answer: −b. Source: Wikipedia: Vieta's formulas
  • The coefficients in the expansion of a power of a binomial, such as (x + y)⁴, form a row of which array of numbers? Answer: Pascal's triangle. Source: Wikipedia: Binomial theorem
  • Eccentricity measures how far a conic section is from being circular. What is the eccentricity of a parabola? Answer: 1. Source: Wikipedia: Eccentricity (mathematics)
  • Every conic section other than a circle can be defined as the set of points whose distances to a fixed point, the focus, and to a fixed line are in a constant ratio. What is the fixed line called? Answer: The directrix. Source: Wikipedia: Conic section
  • The floor function gives the greatest integer less than or equal to a number. What is the floor of −2.4? Answer: −3. Source: Wikipedia: Floor and ceiling functions
  • The graph of an inverse function is the reflection of the graph of the original function across which line? Answer: y = x. Source: Wikipedia: Inverse function
  • In a normal distribution, about what percentage of the values lie within one standard deviation of the mean? Answer: 68%. Source: Wikipedia: 68–95–99.7 rule
  • In an arithmetic sequence such as 5, 7, 9, 11, 13, what is the constant gap between each term and the one before it called? Answer: The common difference. Source: Wikipedia: Arithmetic progression
  • The law of cosines generalizes which theorem, which holds only for right triangles? Answer: The Pythagorean theorem. Source: Wikipedia: Law of cosines
  • The Pythagorean identity gives one value for sin²θ + cos²θ whatever the angle θ. What is it? Answer: 1. Source: Wikipedia: Pythagorean trigonometric identity
  • The standard deviation of a set of data is the square root of which other measure? Answer: The variance. Source: Wikipedia: Standard deviation
  • What is a selection of items from a set called when the order of selection does not matter? Answer: A combination. Source: Wikipedia: Combination
  • What is a straight line called that a curve comes ever closer to as it runs off to infinity? Answer: An asymptote. Source: Wikipedia: Asymptote
  • What is the common logarithm, the logarithm to base 10, of 1,000? Answer: 3. Source: Wikipedia: Logarithm
  • What is the common ratio of the geometric sequence 2, 6, 18, 54? Answer: 3. Source: Wikipedia: Geometric progression
  • What is the complex conjugate of 3 + 4i? Answer: 3 − 4i. Source: Wikipedia: Complex conjugate
  • What is the determinant of the 2 × 2 matrix whose first row is a, b and whose second row is c, d? Answer: ad − bc. Source: Wikipedia: Determinant
  • What is the fundamental period of the sine function, measured in radians? Answer: 2π. Source: Wikipedia: Periodic function
  • Which technique converts a quadratic polynomial ax² + bx + c to the form a(x − h)² + k? Answer: Completing the square. Source: Wikipedia: Completing the square

Chemistry 22

  • A galvanic cell, or voltaic cell, generates an electric current from which kind of spontaneous reaction? Answer: Oxidation–reduction. Source: Wikipedia: Galvanic cell
  • Adding salt to water for de-icing roads and adding antifreeze to the water in a car both rely on which effect? Answer: Freezing-point depression. Source: Wikipedia: Freezing-point depression
  • By Dalton's law, the total pressure of a mixture of gases that do not react is equal to what? Answer: The sum of their partial pressures. Source: Wikipedia: Dalton's law
  • By Graham's law, the rate at which a gas effuses is inversely proportional to the square root of what? Answer: Its molar mass. Source: Wikipedia: Graham's law
  • By Hess's law, the total enthalpy change over the complete course of a chemical reaction is independent of what? Answer: The sequence of steps taken. Source: Wikipedia: Hess's law
  • By the Aufbau principle, electrons fill the subshells of lowest energy first. Which subshell is filled first of all? Answer: 1s. Source: Wikipedia: Aufbau principle
  • Every alcohol carries at least one functional group made of an oxygen atom and a hydrogen atom. What is that group called? Answer: Hydroxyl. Source: Wikipedia: Alcohol (chemistry)
  • Glucose, acetic acid and formaldehyde have different molecular formulas but share the same simplest whole-number ratio of atoms. What is that ratio written out called? Answer: The empirical formula. Source: Wikipedia: Empirical formula
  • The indicator phenolphthalein is colorless in acidic solutions. Which color does it turn in basic solutions? Answer: Pink. Source: Wikipedia: Phenolphthalein
  • Molar concentration, or molarity, is the number of moles of solute per what? Answer: Liter of solution. Source: Wikipedia: Molar concentration
  • The pH scale is logarithmic. A difference of one in pH is equivalent to how large a difference in hydrogen ion concentration? Answer: Tenfold. Source: Wikipedia: pH
  • Stoichiometry, the study of the quantities of reactants and products in chemical reactions, is based on which law? Answer: The law of conservation of mass. Source: Wikipedia: Stoichiometry
  • VSEPR theory predicts the geometry of a molecule. The letters VSEP stand for 'valence shell electron pair'. What does the R stand for? Answer: Repulsion. Source: Wikipedia: VSEPR theory
  • What are molecules called that have an identical molecular formula but distinct arrangements of atoms in space? Answer: Isomers. Source: Wikipedia: Isomer
  • What is a solution called whose pH does not change significantly when a small amount of strong acid or base is added to it? Answer: A buffer solution. Source: Wikipedia: Buffer solution
  • What is the greatest number of electrons that a single atomic orbital can hold? Answer: 2. Source: Wikipedia: Atomic orbital
  • What is the minimum energy called that is needed to remove the most loosely bound electron from an isolated gaseous atom? Answer: Ionization energy. Source: Wikipedia: Ionization energy
  • What is the solid called that settles out of a liquid solution? Answer: A precipitate. Source: Wikipedia: Precipitation (chemistry)
  • When an acid donates a proton in a chemical reaction, what is the species that remains called? Answer: Its conjugate base. Source: Wikipedia: Conjugate (acid-base theory)
  • Which bonds are the strongest type of covalent chemical bond, formed by head-on overlap between atomic orbitals? Answer: Sigma bonds. Source: Wikipedia: Sigma bond
  • Which device is used to measure the heat of chemical reactions or of physical changes? Answer: A calorimeter. Source: Wikipedia: Calorimeter
  • Which ion, written H₃O⁺, is produced when a water molecule gains a proton? Answer: Hydronium. Source: Wikipedia: Hydronium

American literature 27

  • 'A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds' is a line from which essay of 1841 by Ralph Waldo Emerson? Answer: Self-Reliance. Source: Wikipedia: Self-Reliance
  • Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is the direct sequel to which earlier novel by Mark Twain? Answer: The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. Source: Wikipedia: Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
  • Arthur Miller's play The Crucible is a dramatized and partly fictionalized story of which events of 1692 and 1693? Answer: The Salem witch trials. Source: Wikipedia: The Crucible
  • Buck, the central character of Jack London's novel The Call of the Wild, is what kind of animal? Answer: A dog. Source: Wikipedia: The Call of the Wild
  • For how long did Henry David Thoreau live in the cabin he built near Walden Pond, the stay he describes in Walden? Answer: Two years, two months and two days. Source: Wikipedia: Walden
  • Henry David Thoreau's essay Civil Disobedience was motivated by his opposition to slavery and to which war? Answer: The Mexican–American War. Source: Wikipedia: Civil Disobedience (essay)
  • Holden Caulfield is the narrator and main character of which novel of 1951? Answer: The Catcher in the Rye. Source: Wikipedia: The Catcher in the Rye
  • In Emily Dickinson's poem 'Because I could not stop for Death', Death is a gentleman who picks the speaker up in what? Answer: A horse carriage. Source: Wikipedia: Because I could not stop for Death
  • In Ernest Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea, the aging fisherman Santiago struggles for a long time to catch which fish? Answer: A giant marlin. Source: Wikipedia: The Old Man and the Sea
  • In Herman Melville's Moby-Dick, what is the name of the whaling ship commanded by Captain Ahab? Answer: The Pequod. Source: Wikipedia: Moby-Dick
  • In Herman Melville's story 'Bartleby, the Scrivener', a clerk in a Wall Street law office comes to answer every request with which words? Answer: I would prefer not to. Source: Wikipedia: Bartleby, the Scrivener
  • In John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath, the Joads, a family of tenant farmers, are driven from their home in which state? Answer: Oklahoma. Source: Wikipedia: The Grapes of Wrath
  • In Stephen Crane's novel The Red Badge of Courage, what is the 'red badge' that the young private Henry Fleming longs for? Answer: A wound. Source: Wikipedia: The Red Badge of Courage
  • In which century is Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter set, among the Puritans of the Massachusetts Bay Colony? Answer: The 17th. Source: Wikipedia: The Scarlet Letter
  • In which region of the United States did Transcendentalism develop in the late 1820s and 1830s? Answer: New England. Source: Wikipedia: Transcendentalism
  • In Willa Cather's novel My Ántonia, Jim Burden and Ántonia Shimerda are brought as children to be pioneers in which state? Answer: Nebraska. Source: Wikipedia: My Ántonia
  • The short free verse poems of Edgar Lee Masters's Spoon River Anthology, published in 1915, take which form? Answer: Epitaphs of a town's residents. Source: Wikipedia: Spoon River Anthology
  • Thornton Wilder's play Our Town presents everyday life between 1901 and 1913 in which fictional American town? Answer: Grover's Corners. Source: Wikipedia: Our Town
  • The title of Lorraine Hansberry's play A Raisin in the Sun comes from a poem by which poet? Answer: Langston Hughes. Source: Wikipedia: A Raisin in the Sun
  • Walt Whitman's poem 'O Captain! My Captain!', written in 1865, is about the death of which president? Answer: Abraham Lincoln. Source: Wikipedia: O Captain! My Captain!
  • Which American playwright, the author of Long Day's Journey into Night, was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature for 1936? Answer: Eugene O'Neill. Source: Wikipedia: Eugene O'Neill
  • Who is credited with coining the term 'Lost Generation', which Ernest Hemingway used in the epigraph of The Sun Also Rises? Answer: Gertrude Stein. Source: Wikipedia: Lost Generation
  • Who is the first-person narrator of F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby? Answer: Nick Carraway. Source: Wikipedia: The Great Gatsby
  • Who was the first writer in England's North American colonies to be published? Answer: Anne Bradstreet. Source: Wikipedia: Anne Bradstreet
  • Willy Loman, a traveling salesman, is the protagonist of which play of 1949 by Arthur Miller? Answer: Death of a Salesman. Source: Wikipedia: Death of a Salesman
  • Yoknapatawpha County, the fictional county in which William Faulkner set all but three of his novels from 1929 onwards, lies in which state? Answer: Mississippi. Source: Wikipedia: Yoknapatawpha County
  • Zora Neale Hurston wrote her novel Their Eyes Were Watching God in the span of seven weeks while she was in which country? Answer: Haiti. Source: Wikipedia: Their Eyes Were Watching God

How it works

Ninety-five questions pitched at a junior year: United States history from the Kentucky Resolutions to the Fair Deal, a second year of algebra, chemistry, and American writers from Anne Bradstreet to Arthur Miller. Each answer names its source article.

Read the full guide

What each round holds

US history keeps to the laws, pacts and doctrines a survey course names: the Wilmot Proviso, the Sherman Antitrust Act, the Good Neighbor policy. Algebra II and trigonometry asks for ideas more than sums: complex numbers, conic sections, logarithms, the law of cosines. Chemistry takes up orbitals, molecular shape, solutions, and acids and bases. American literature names the narrators, towns and ships of the junior-year reading list, with a few poems.

Before a unit test

Pick the round that matches the unit, put it on the board and let two teams answer in turn. The quiz pauses for a score after every ten questions, which is a natural place to swap teams.

  • Algebra II and trigonometry is the gentlest round by our estimate, and US history the hardest: six of its twenty-three questions are hard.
  • Keep scratch paper near for Algebra II and trigonometry. A few of its answers take one line of working.

Questions and answers

What is the eccentricity of a parabola?

Exactly 1. Eccentricity measures how far a conic section is from being circular: a circle has 0, an ellipse that is not a circle falls between 0 and 1, and a hyperbola is greater than 1.

What was the Wilmot Proviso?

An unsuccessful proposal of 1846 to ban slavery in territory acquired from Mexico in the Mexican–American War. It passed the House and failed in the Senate, and the conflict over it helped lead to the Civil War.

What does VSEPR stand for?

Valence shell electron pair repulsion. The theory predicts the geometry of a molecule from the number of electron pairs around its central atoms, and is also named the Gillespie–Nyholm theory after its two main developers.

What is the name of the ship in Moby-Dick?

The Pequod, a whaling ship under Captain Ahab. The sailor Ishmael narrates Ahab's quest for the giant white sperm whale of the title. Herman Melville published the novel in 1851.

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