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Scientists & Inventors Quiz

Discoveries, inventions and the people behind them. A 32-question quiz on the scientists and inventors who changed how the world works.

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  1. What is Albert Einstein's most famous equation?
    Answer: E=mc²
  2. How many laws of motion did Isaac Newton state in his Principia?
    Answer: Three
  3. Charles Darwin is best known for his theory of what?
    Answer: Evolution by natural selection
  4. How many Nobel Prizes did Marie Curie win?
    Answer: Two
  5. Which device for recording and playing back sound did Thomas Edison invent in 1877?
    Answer: The phonograph
  6. Ada Lovelace worked with which inventor on the Analytical Engine?
    Answer: Charles Babbage
  7. Which disease did Stephen Hawking live with for most of his life?
    Answer: Motor neurone disease (ALS)
  8. Who was awarded the first US patent for the telephone in 1876?
    Answer: Alexander Graham Bell
  9. In which year did the Wright brothers make the first powered aeroplane flight?
    Answer: 1903
  10. Nikola Tesla championed which type of electric current?
    Answer: Alternating current (AC)
  11. In which year did Albert Einstein win the Nobel Prize in Physics?
    Answer: 1921
  12. Einstein won his Nobel Prize for explaining which phenomenon?
    Answer: The photoelectric effect
  13. Which two elements did Marie Curie discover with her husband Pierre in 1898?
    Answer: Radium and polonium
  14. What is the title of Charles Darwin's landmark 1859 book?
    Answer: On the Origin of Species
  15. On which ship did Charles Darwin travel during his famous voyage?
    Answer: HMS Beagle
  16. A. P. J. Abdul Kalam is popularly known by which nickname?
    Answer: The Missile Man of India
  17. In which years did A. P. J. Abdul Kalam serve as President of India?
    Answer: 2002–2007
  18. What is the title of Stephen Hawking's bestselling 1988 book about the universe?
    Answer: A Brief History of Time
  19. Gregor Mendel discovered the laws of inheritance by experimenting with which plant?
    Answer: Pea plants
  20. Who created the first widely recognised periodic table of elements in 1869?
    Answer: Dmitri Mendeleev
  21. In which year was Isaac Newton's Principia published?
    Answer: 1687
  22. In which year did Thomas Edison invent the phonograph?
    Answer: 1877
  23. In which year did Edison's practical incandescent light bulb pass its first successful test?
    Answer: 1879
  24. Nikola Tesla was born in 1856 in which village, then part of the Austrian Empire?
    Answer: Smiljan
  25. Abdus Salam shared the 1979 Nobel Prize in Physics with which two physicists?
    Answer: Sheldon Glashow and Steven Weinberg
  26. For which theory did Abdus Salam win his Nobel Prize?
    Answer: The unification of the weak and electromagnetic forces
  27. In which year was Galileo Galilei tried by the Roman Inquisition?
    Answer: 1633
  28. Galileo's telescope revealed four large moons orbiting which planet?
    Answer: Jupiter
  29. In which year did Louis Pasteur give the first rabies vaccine to a boy bitten by a rabid dog?
    Answer: 1885
  30. Rosalind Franklin's X-ray image known as 'Photo 51' provided key evidence for what?
    Answer: The double-helix structure of DNA
  31. At which wartime site did Alan Turing work on breaking the German Enigma code?
    Answer: Bletchley Park
  32. Katherine Johnson hand-checked the computer's trajectory calculations for which 1969 NASA mission?
    Answer: Apollo 11

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