Question library
Every original Magnitudle question, by theme. Each page lets you play first, then shows the sourced answer and a way to estimate it.
🪐 Space 12 questions
- On average, how far away is the Moon from Earth, measured in kilometres?
- Roughly how many stars shine in our own galaxy, the Milky Way?
- What is the temperature at the visible surface of the Sun, in degrees Celsius?
- If the Sun were an empty shell, about how many planets the size of Earth could you pour into it?
- The International Space Station circles Earth at a steady pace. How fast is it moving, in kilometres per hour?
- Launched in 1977, Voyager 1 is the most distant object humans have ever built. In the mid 2020s, roughly how many kilometres from Earth is it?
- Proxima Centauri is the closest star to the Sun. How many kilometres separate us from it?
- A ray of light leaves the surface of the Sun. How many seconds later does it arrive on Earth?
- If you could put planet Earth on a bathroom scale, how many kilograms would it show?
- Venus spins extremely slowly. How many Earth days does it take Venus to rotate once on its axis?
- Light crosses the Milky Way's disc of stars from one edge to the other. How many years does that trip take?
- In all of history, how many human beings have set foot on the surface of the Moon?
🌍 Earth 12 questions
- How high above sea level is the summit of Mount Everest, in metres?
- The Challenger Deep in the Mariana Trench is the deepest known point of the ocean. How many metres below the surface is it?
- How long is a trip once around the Earth along the equator, in kilometres?
- From its most distant source to the Mediterranean, how many kilometres long is the Nile?
- How much ground does the Sahara desert cover, in square kilometres?
- Air is light, but there is a lot of it. What is the total mass of Earth's atmosphere, in kilograms?
- Satellites keep watch on thunderstorms across the globe. Roughly how many lightning flashes happen on Earth in one day?
- Suppose you dug a shaft straight down from your feet to the exact centre of the Earth. How many kilometres deep would it be?
- How many cubic kilometres of ice are locked up in the Antarctic ice sheet?
- Indonesia is the largest archipelago nation on Earth. Roughly how many islands does it consist of?
- The Amazon carries more water than any other river. On average, how many cubic metres does it pour into the Atlantic each second?
- Angel Falls in Venezuela is the tallest waterfall on land. What is its total height in metres?
🫀 Human body 12 questions
- Count every bone in a typical adult human skeleton. What number do you reach?
- About how many neurons are packed into one adult human brain?
- At rest and at work, asleep and awake: roughly how many breaths does an adult take in 24 hours?
- One complete copy of the human genome is written in chemical letters called base pairs. How many of them does it contain?
- A healthy adult carries a huge population of bacteria, mostly in the gut. About how many individual bacteria is that?
- Gas exchange in the lungs happens in tiny air sacs called alveoli. How many alveoli does an adult have in both lungs combined?
- Each kidney cleans the blood using microscopic filtering units called nephrons. About how many nephrons are there in a single kidney?
- Roughly how many skeletal muscles are there in the human body?
- About how many protein-coding genes does a human being have?
- The fastest signals in the human nervous system run along thick, insulated nerve fibres. What speed do they reach, in metres per second?
- What does an average adult human brain weigh, in grams?
- Estimate the number of atoms that make up a 70 kg human body.
🐘 Animals 12 questions
- Roughly how many species of birds are known to science today?
- A peregrine falcon folds its wings and dives onto its prey. What is the highest speed recorded in such a dive, in kilometres per hour?
- Roughly how many chickens are alive on Earth at any given moment?
- Researchers from Hong Kong and Germany pooled hundreds of field studies to estimate the number of ants alive on Earth. What figure did they arrive at?
- The Arctic tern commutes between the Arctic and Antarctica, chasing summer all year. About how many kilometres does one bird fly in a single year?
- African elephants have the longest pregnancy of any land mammal. How many days does it last?
- While hovering or flying hard, how many times per minute can a hummingbird's heart beat?
- The ocean sunfish (Mola mola) holds the record for the most eggs of any vertebrate. How many eggs can one female carry at a time?
- The deepest dive ever recorded for a mammal was made by a tagged Cuvier's beaked whale. How many metres down did it go?
- According to the Smithsonian Institution, roughly how many individual insects are alive on Earth at any one time?
- About how many quills cover the body of a North American porcupine?
- Leaving out poultry and pets, roughly how many wild birds are alive in the world?
🍜 Food 12 questions
- Farmers on every continent except Antarctica grow wheat. Roughly how many tonnes are harvested worldwide in a year?
- According to the UN Environment Programme, about how many tonnes of food are thrown away each year by households, shops and restaurants worldwide?
- Chilli heat is rated in Scoville heat units. What rating did Pepper X receive when Guinness certified it as the hottest chilli in the world?
- Counting the water needed to grow the animal's feed, roughly how many litres of water does it take to produce one kilogram of beef?
- How many kilocalories are there in one kilogram of butter?
- Saffron is made from the tiny red stigmas of crocus flowers, picked by hand. About how many flowers are needed to make one kilogram of dried saffron?
- Roughly how many servings of instant noodles are eaten around the world in a year?
- Three Michelin stars is the highest rating the famous red guide awards. Roughly how many restaurants in the whole world hold three stars?
- Growers compete every autumn to raise monster pumpkins. Roughly how much did the heaviest pumpkin ever weighed tip the scales at, in kilograms?
- Look closely at one ordinary strawberry. About how many seeds are dotted over its surface?
- About how many kernels are there on an average ear of maize (corn on the cob)?
- Roughly how many tonnes of processed, ready to brew tea are produced around the world in one year?
💰 Money 12 questions
- Add up everything produced and sold in every economy on Earth in one year in the mid 2020s. Roughly what is world GDP in US dollars?
- The large gold bars stacked in central bank vaults follow a 'Good Delivery' standard of about 400 troy ounces. About how many kilograms does one such bar weigh?
- In 2017 Leonardo da Vinci's Salvator Mundi became the most expensive painting ever sold at auction. What was the final price in US dollars, fees included?
- Roughly how many different official currencies are in use across the world's countries today?
- In 1867 the Russian Empire sold Alaska to the United States. How much did the buyers pay, in US dollars of the time?
- The International Space Station is often called the most expensive object ever built. Roughly how much has it cost all partner nations combined, in US dollars?
- During its hyperinflation, Zimbabwe issued the banknote with the highest face value of modern times in January 2009. How many Zimbabwean dollars was it worth?
- Roughly how many euro banknotes are in circulation?
- How much money comes with a full Nobel Prize in the mid 2020s, in Swedish kronor?
- Roughly how much did it cost to build the Burj Khalifa tower in Dubai, in US dollars?
- Bitcoin's code sets a hard limit on how many coins can ever exist. What is that limit?
- Imagine one billion US dollars in cash, all in 100-dollar bills. How many kilograms would the pile weigh?
💾 Tech 12 questions
- Apple's M1 laptop chip, released in 2020, is smaller than a postage stamp. How many transistors does it contain?
- The Intel 4004 of 1971 was the first commercial microprocessor. How many transistors did it have?
- The classic internet addressing system, IPv4, uses 32-bit addresses. How many different addresses does that allow?
- According to the UN's telecom agency, roughly how many people on Earth use the internet in the mid 2020s?
- Spam, newsletters, work threads and all: roughly how many emails are sent and received worldwide in a single day in the mid 2020s?
- Television and weather satellites in geostationary orbit appear to hang motionless above the equator. How many kilometres above Earth's surface do they fly?
- How many individual pixels make up one frame of 4K Ultra HD video (3840 by 2160)?
- ENIAC, completed in 1945, was one of the first general-purpose electronic computers. About how many vacuum tubes did it use?
- The Large Hadron Collider at CERN is a ring-shaped tunnel under the French and Swiss border. How long is one lap of the ring, in metres?
- The first commercial hard disk drive, the IBM 350 of 1956, was the size of two refrigerators. How many characters of data could it store?
- Roughly how much electricity does the whole world generate in one year, in terawatt-hours?
- The Three Gorges Dam in China is the most powerful power station on Earth. What is its installed generating capacity in megawatts?
🚆 Transport 12 questions
- Cars, vans, trucks and buses: roughly how many motor vehicles are in use on the world's roads?
- On a normal day, roughly how many scheduled commercial flights take off around the world?
- The Trans-Siberian Railway links Moscow with Vladivostok on the Pacific. How long is the line, in kilometres?
- A ship sails through the Panama Canal from the Atlantic to the Pacific. How many kilometres long is the passage?
- The Airbus A380 is the largest passenger aircraft ever built. With its tanks brimmed, how many litres of fuel does it carry?
- The largest container ships now afloat are about 400 metres long. How many standard 20-foot containers (TEU) can one of them carry?
- Concorde carried passengers across the Atlantic at about twice the speed of sound. What was its cruising speed in kilometres per hour?
- Switzerland's Gotthard Base Tunnel, opened in 2016, is the longest railway tunnel in the world. How many kilometres long is it?
- The Saturn V rocket that sent astronauts to the Moon was lifted by five F-1 engines. How much thrust did they produce together at liftoff, in newtons?
- Oil, ore, grain, containers and everything else: roughly how many tonnes of cargo are carried by sea around the world in a year?
- The longest scheduled passenger flight in the world links Singapore with New York without a stop. How many kilometres is the great-circle distance between the two airports?
- In 2015 a Japanese maglev train with people on board set the all-time speed record for rail vehicles. What speed did it reach, in kilometres per hour?
🏟️ Sports & culture 12 questions
- What is the official distance of a marathon, expressed in metres?
- About how many athletes took part in the Paris 2024 Summer Olympic Games?
- During his 100 m world record run in Berlin in 2009, what top speed did Usain Bolt reach, in kilometres per hour?
- The deciding match of the 1950 World Cup, Uruguay against Brazil at the Maracana in Rio, drew the biggest crowd ever recorded at a football match. About how many people were there?
- How many national football associations are members of FIFA?
- Olympic gold medals are mostly silver with a gold coating. According to IOC rules, at least how many grams of pure gold must each one contain?
- An Olympic swimming pool is 50 m long, 25 m wide and at least 2 m deep. How many litres of water does it take to fill one?
- India's Sachin Tendulkar is the highest run scorer in the history of Test cricket. About how many Test runs did he score in his career?
- Swimmer Michael Phelps is the most decorated Olympian of all time. How many Olympic medals did he win in total?
- According to FIFA, roughly how many people around the world watched the 2022 World Cup final between Argentina and France?
- FIFA once ran a worldwide census of the game called the Big Count. How many people did it find playing football, counting both registered and casual players?
- The longest tennis match ever played, John Isner against Nicolas Mahut at Wimbledon in 2010, was spread over three days. How many minutes of play did it last?
🏛️ History 12 questions
- Soldiers and civilians together, roughly how many people lost their lives because of the Second World War?
- Despite its name, the Hundred Years' War between England and France was not exactly a century long. How many years passed from its start to its end?
- Roughly how many people were alive on Earth in the year 1800?
- Near Xi'an in China, the first emperor was buried with an army of life-sized clay soldiers. Roughly how many soldiers are estimated to stand in the pits?
- At its greatest extent, around 1920, how many square kilometres of land did the British Empire cover?
- About how many stone blocks were used to build the Great Pyramid of Giza?
- From 1961 to 1989 the Berlin Wall sealed off West Berlin completely. How many kilometres long was the entire barrier around it?
- When the Titanic left on her first and only voyage in April 1912, about how many people were on board, passengers and crew together?
- At its peak in the mid 1960s, how many people were working on the Apollo Moon programme, including staff at contractors and universities?
- Around 1455 Johannes Gutenberg completed the first major book printed in Europe with movable type. About how many copies of his Bible did he print?
- On D-Day, 6 June 1944, how many Allied troops landed in Normandy by sea and air within the first 24 hours?
- Roughly how many moai, the giant stone statues, have been catalogued on Easter Island (Rapa Nui)?
FAQ
Are the daily questions listed here?
No. Daily questions stay secret until their day, so this library only contains the questions used in Practice, Survival, Higher or Lower and the Magnitude Quiz.