True or False Questions to Ask
True or false questions to ask a group at a party, in a classroom or on a long drive: 79 statements in six groups, starting with the myths everyone has heard and moving through animals, the human body, science and space, geography and history, and food. True and false are mixed in every group in no fixed order, and each statement comes with its answer and the reason behind it.
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The questions
Each question, and why to ask it
Classics
True or false: you can see the Great Wall of China from space with the naked eye.
Why ask it
False, and a good one to open with because most rooms split on it. The wall is long but only a few metres wide, which is the dimension that matters from that far up, and astronauts have generally reported not being able to pick it out. If someone mentions photographs, those were taken through long lenses, and the statement says naked eye.
True or false: goldfish have a memory of about three seconds.
Why ask it
False. Goldfish have been taught to come to one spot at feeding time and to tell colours and shapes apart, and they keep what they learn for weeks or months. Anyone who has kept one will tell you it swims to the front of the tank when the food tin appears.
True or false: a tomato is a fruit.
Why ask it
True to a botanist, since it grows from the flower and carries the seeds, and a vegetable to a cook, since it goes in the salad and not the dessert. Ask what else on the plate is a fruit by the same rule: cucumbers, peppers and pumpkins all qualify.
True or false: humans only use ten percent of their brains.
Why ask it
False. Brain scans show activity in every region over the course of a day, and damage to almost any part causes problems, which would not happen if nine tenths were spare. The idea survives because it flatters: everyone would like to have ninety percent in reserve.
True or false: you cannot tickle yourself.
Why ask it
True for most people, and the one statement here that a group can test on the spot. The brain predicts the feeling its own movements will produce, so the surprise that tickling depends on is missing.
True or false: honey can still be edible after thousands of years.
Why ask it
True. Honey holds very little water and is mildly acidic, so microbes struggle to grow in it, and pots found in ancient Egyptian tombs have been reported as still fit to eat. A jar that has gone cloudy and solid has only crystallised, and gentle warming turns it back.
True or false: lightning never strikes the same place twice.
Why ask it
False. Lightning favours the tallest point around, so towers and masts are hit again and again, and the Empire State Building is struck more than twenty times in an average year. A lightning rod relies on exactly that: it gives the strike the same place to land every time.
True or false: bats are blind.
Why ask it
False. Every kind of bat has working eyes, and the large fruit bats find their way mainly by sight and smell. Echolocation is an extra sense for hunting in the dark, and the phrase blind as a bat has done the rest.
True or false: the Eiffel Tower is taller in summer than in winter.
Why ask it
True. Iron expands as it warms, so on a hot day the tower stands several centimetres taller than it does in a cold snap. The people who vote false usually suspect a trick, so ask them what they thought the catch was.
True or false: your fingernails and hair keep growing after you die.
Why ask it
False. Growth stops; what looks like growth is the skin drying and drawing back, which leaves the nails and stubble standing out more. Like a lot of myths, it is an accurate observation with the wrong explanation attached.
Animals
True or false: octopuses have three hearts.
Why ask it
True. Two of the hearts push blood through the gills and the third sends it around the rest of the body, and that third one stops beating while the animal swims, which is part of why an octopus would sooner crawl. For a bonus point, the blood they pump is blue.
True or false: a spider is an insect.
Why ask it
False. Spiders are arachnids, with eight legs and a body in two sections, while insects have six legs and three sections. Scorpions, ticks and mites sit on the spider's side of the line, so name one of those as a follow-up and see who was listening.
True or false: bulls are enraged by the colour red.
Why ask it
False. Cattle cannot tell red from green, and what a bull charges at is the movement of the cape, whatever colour it happens to be. If someone asks why the cape is red anyway, the honest answer is tradition and showmanship.
True or false: a giraffe has the same number of neck bones as a human.
Why ask it
True: seven each, though every one of the giraffe's is well over twenty centimetres long. Nearly everyone votes false on instinct, so have them guess a number before you give the answer.
True or false: sharks are mammals.
Why ask it
False, they are fish. It gets answered wrong because people know some sharks give birth to live young, which feels like a mammal trait, but they breathe through gills and do not feed their young on milk. Whales and dolphins are the mammals people are thinking of.
True or false: the koala is a kind of bear.
Why ask it
False. Koalas are marsupials, raising their young in a pouch as kangaroos and wombats do, and the name koala bear comes from settlers who thought they looked the part. Giant pandas, on the other hand, are bears, which catches the people who have just learned to distrust the word.
True or false: a polar bear's skin is black.
Why ask it
True. The fur only looks white: each hair is colourless and hollow and scatters the light, and the skin underneath is dark. Point out the nose and the paw pads, which were showing the answer all along.
True or false: penguins live at the North Pole.
Why ask it
False. Wild penguins belong to the southern half of the world, from Antarctica up to the coasts of South Africa, Australia and South America, with one species reaching the equator on the Galapagos Islands. Polar bears are Arctic animals, so the two have never met outside a zoo or a cartoon.
True or false: hummingbirds can fly backwards.
Why ask it
True. Their wings sweep in a figure of eight and can push air in either direction, so they hover and then reverse out of a flower. A plain true with no catch in it stops players voting false out of habit.
True or false: a group of crows is called a murder.
Why ask it
True, though you are more likely to meet the word in a quiz than in a bird guide, where flock does the job. It belongs to a family of old collective nouns that includes a parliament of owls and an unkindness of ravens, and asking for more of them can fill five minutes.
True or false: ostriches bury their heads in the sand when they are frightened.
Why ask it
False. An ostrich nests in a shallow pit and lowers its head to turn the eggs, and from a distance that looks like a bird with its head underground. A frightened one runs, or lies flat with its neck stretched along the ground.
True or false: camels store water in their humps.
Why ask it
False, the hump is fat, a food reserve for long stretches without eating. A camel copes with thirst in other ways, including drinking an enormous amount in one go when it finds water. Expect a near-unanimous vote for true.
True or false: butterflies taste with their feet.
Why ask it
True. They have taste sensors on their feet, so landing on a leaf tells a butterfly whether it is worth feeding on or laying eggs there. Younger children love this one, and will want to discuss what they would least like to step in.
True or false: dogs can only see in black and white.
Why ask it
False. Dogs see colour, only fewer colours than we do: mainly blues and yellows, with red and green hard to tell apart. A dog owner can test it later with a red ball on green grass, which the dog will find by smell.
True or false: an adult elephant cannot jump.
Why ask it
True. A grown elephant is too heavy, and its legs too much like pillars, to get all four feet off the ground at once; even at full speed it keeps at least one foot down. The longer version you may hear, that it is the only mammal that cannot jump, is wrong, because a sloth cannot either.
Human Body
True or false: an adult human has 206 bones.
Why ask it
True as the textbook count for an adult. A baby is born with a good many more, usually put at 270 to 300, which fuse during childhood, so you finish with fewer bones than you started with. A few people carry an extra rib or an extra small bone in the foot, so allow the objection if it comes.
True or false: the blood in your veins is blue until it meets the air.
Why ask it
False. Blood is red all the way round, brighter when it carries oxygen and darker when it does not. Veins look blue because of the way skin scatters light, and the colour-coded diagrams in textbooks have a lot to answer for.
True or false: different parts of your tongue taste sweet, sour, salty and bitter.
Why ask it
False. Every area of the tongue that has taste buds can pick up all of the basic tastes, and the neat map in old schoolbooks came from a misreading of an early experiment. A few grains of salt on the tip of the tongue, the supposed sweet zone, settle it in seconds.
True or false: the smallest bone in your body is in your ear.
Why ask it
True. It is the stapes, or stirrup, in the middle ear, and it is only a few millimetres long. Ask where the largest bone is as a bonus, which most people get right: the thigh.
True or false: you are taller in the morning than in the evening.
Why ask it
True, by about a centimetre. The discs between the bones of your spine are squashed a little by a day of standing and sitting, and they recover overnight. It can be checked at home with a door frame and a pencil, which makes it good homework for a class.
True or false: humans have exactly five senses.
Why ask it
False. Sight, hearing, smell, taste and touch are the school list, but you also sense balance, temperature, pain and where your own limbs are. Have everyone close their eyes and touch their nose: that is one of the extra ones at work.
True or false: cracking your knuckles gives you arthritis.
Why ask it
False, as far as anyone has been able to show. The pop is gas shifting in the fluid of the joint, and comparisons of lifelong crackers with people who never do it have not found more arthritis in the crackers. Somebody present was told otherwise by a grandparent, so let them tell it.
True or false: swallowed chewing gum stays in your stomach for seven years.
Why ask it
False. Your body cannot digest the gum base, but it moves along with everything else and is gone within days. Nobody has traced where the seven came from, and it has the ring of a number a tired parent made up on the spot.
True or false: the human heart has four chambers.
Why ask it
True: two atria on top that receive blood and two ventricles below that pump it out, one pair serving the lungs and the other the rest of the body. Offer a bonus point to anyone who can name all four, left and right of each.
True or false: tooth enamel is the hardest substance in the human body.
Why ask it
True. Enamel is almost entirely mineral, which makes it harder than bone, and that surprises the people who were thinking of the skull or the thigh. The catch is that it contains no living cells, so a chip cannot grow back the way a broken bone knits.
True or false: shaving makes hair grow back thicker and darker.
Why ask it
False. A razor cuts each hair at its widest point and leaves a blunt end, which feels coarse and looks darker against the skin as it comes through, but nothing changes at the root. The number of hairs, their colour and how fast they grow stay as they were.
True or false: the adult human body is about sixty percent water.
Why ask it
True as an average, and it varies with age, sex and build, with infants higher and older adults lower. If someone challenges the exact number they are right to, because it is a range and not a constant.
True or false: identical twins have identical fingerprints.
Why ask it
False. Twins share their DNA, but the ridges on a fingertip are also shaped by conditions in the womb, so each twin ends up with a set of their own. If there is a pair of twins playing, this is the one statement where they get to be the authority.
Science and Space
True or false: the Sun is a star.
Why ask it
True, and an ordinary one: it looks nothing like the others only because it is so close, with the next nearest star more than four light years away. It is an easy point for adults and a real discovery for a six-year-old, so start here with a young group.
True or false: summer happens because the Earth is closer to the Sun.
Why ask it
False. Seasons come from the tilt of the Earth's axis, which leans each hemisphere towards the Sun for half the year. The quickest proof is that Australia has summer while Europe has winter, and the Earth is in fact nearest the Sun in early January.
True or false: the far side of the Moon is always dark.
Why ask it
False. The far side gets just as much sunlight as the side we see; it is hidden, because the Moon turns once for each trip around the Earth and keeps one face towards us. At new moon, when our side is dark, the far side is in full daylight.
True or false: a day on Venus is longer than a year on Venus.
Why ask it
True. Venus takes about 243 Earth days to turn once on its axis and about 225 to travel round the Sun, so the spin outlasts the lap. When someone says that cannot be right, have them say what a day and a year each measure, and it sorts itself out.
True or false: Mercury is the hottest planet because it is closest to the Sun.
Why ask it
False. Venus is hotter, at well over 400 degrees Celsius by day and by night, because its thick atmosphere holds the heat in. Mercury has almost no air to do that job, so its night side is far colder than anywhere on Earth.
True or false: sunlight takes about eight minutes to reach the Earth.
Why ask it
True. Light covers roughly 300,000 kilometres every second and the Sun is about 150 million kilometres away, which works out at a little over eight minutes. So the Sun you see is always a little over eight minutes out of date.
True or false: Pluto is still classed as a planet.
Why ask it
False. Astronomers reclassified it as a dwarf planet in 2006, which left the solar system with eight planets. Anyone who learned nine at school may want to argue, and you can let them, because the decision was a vote on a definition and people still grumble about it.
True or false: there is no gravity on the International Space Station.
Why ask it
False. Gravity up there is only about a tenth weaker than on the ground. Astronauts float because the station and everyone in it are falling around the Earth together, like the top of a rollercoaster drop that never ends.
True or false: sound travels faster through water than through air.
Why ask it
True, more than four times faster. Water is much harder to squash than air, so a push on one part of it is handed on to the next more quickly. People guess the other way because voices sound muffled underwater, which has to do with ears built for air.
True or false: a bolt of lightning is hotter than the surface of the Sun.
Why ask it
True. For an instant the air in a lightning channel is heated to several times the temperature of the Sun's surface, and thunder is the sound of that air expanding. The word surface matters, because the Sun's core is hotter than either by a very long way.
True or false: water always boils at 100 degrees Celsius.
Why ask it
False: that figure is for sea level. Air pressure drops as you climb and the boiling point drops with it, which is why pasta and eggs take longer up a mountain. The word to listen for is always, which is the giveaway in a lot of true or false statements.
True or false: water spirals down the drain the opposite way south of the equator.
Why ask it
False for a sink or a bath. The Earth's rotation does turn big storms in opposite directions in the two hemispheres, but across the width of a basin the effect is far too weak, and the shape of the bowl and the way the water was already moving decide the spin. Fill the same sink twice and you can get both directions.
Geography and History
True or false: the largest desert on Earth is the Sahara.
Why ask it
False. Antarctica is larger, because a desert is defined by how little rain or snow it gets, and heat and sand have nothing to do with it. The Sahara is the largest hot desert, so whoever objects has a point, and the argument that follows will be about the definition.
True or false: Vatican City is the smallest country in the world.
Why ask it
True, by area and by population. It sits entirely inside Rome and can be walked across in well under an hour. If someone offers Monaco, tell them they have found second place.
True or false: Russia is the largest country in the world by area.
Why ask it
True, and by a wide margin: it covers roughly a ninth of the world's land and stretches across eleven time zones. The better question comes next, which is who is second, where Canada beats the usual guesses of China and the United States.
True or false: Sydney is the capital of Australia.
Why ask it
False, it is Canberra, a city built for the job after Sydney and Melbourne could not agree which of them should have it. The same trap works with Brazil, Canada and New Zealand, where the capitals are Brasilia, Ottawa and Wellington.
True or false: the Atlantic is the largest ocean on Earth.
Why ask it
False. The Pacific is far bigger, covering about a third of the planet's surface and more area than all the land put together. Many wall maps cut it in two at the edges, half on each side, which is why it gets underrated; turn a globe to the Pacific and you see almost nothing but water.
True or false: Africa lies in all four hemispheres.
Why ask it
True. The equator and the prime meridian both run through it, so parts of the continent are north, south, east and west of the lines. Have a map or a phone ready, because people want to see this one before they believe it.
True or false: Mount Everest is the tallest mountain on Earth measured from base to summit.
Why ask it
False. Everest has the highest summit above sea level, but Mauna Kea in Hawaii rises further from its base, most of which is underwater. The trick is entirely in which starting point you measure from, so read the statement exactly as written.
True or false: Istanbul is a city on two continents.
Why ask it
True. The Bosphorus strait runs through the middle of it, with one part of the city in Europe and the other in Asia. Follow up by asking whether it is the capital of Turkey, since Ankara catches as many people as Canberra does.
True or false: Australia is wider than the Moon.
Why ask it
True. Australia measures about 4,000 kilometres from west to east, and the Moon is a little under 3,500 across. The comparison is width against diameter, so if someone says the Moon is still far bigger overall, they are right about its surface and you can both be happy.
True or false: Egypt has more pyramids than any other country.
Why ask it
False. Sudan has more, by most counts around twice as many, built by the Nubian kingdoms and smaller and steeper than the ones at Giza. Counts differ with what survives and what is included, so give the point for Sudan and leave the totals alone.
True or false: Cleopatra lived closer in time to the Moon landing than to the building of the Great Pyramid.
Why ask it
True. The Great Pyramid was about 2,500 years old when she was born, and the Moon landing came roughly 2,000 years after she died. Read it slowly and give people a moment, because the surprise is how long ancient Egypt lasted.
True or false: Vikings wore horned helmets into battle.
Why ask it
False. No horned helmet has been found on a Viking battlefield or in a Viking grave, and the picture comes largely from nineteenth-century paintings and opera costumes. It shows how easily a costume designer can outvote the archaeology.
True or false: Columbus set out to prove that the Earth was round.
Why ask it
False. Scholars and sailors had accepted a round Earth since the ancient Greeks, who had also made a fair estimate of its size. The quarrel over the voyage was about distance: Columbus believed Asia lay much closer than it does, and the critics who said the ocean was too wide had the better numbers.
True or false: the shortest war in history lasted less than an hour.
Why ask it
True. The war between Britain and Zanzibar in 1896 was over in roughly forty minutes. Take guesses at the length before the reveal, since most people start at days or weeks.
True or false: Napoleon was unusually short.
Why ask it
False. He stood at about the average height for a Frenchman of his day, perhaps a little over. The confusion comes from French units that did not match English ones and from British cartoonists who enjoyed drawing him tiny.
True or false: Albert Einstein failed mathematics at school.
Why ask it
False. He was strong at mathematics from boyhood and was working through calculus in his early teens. The story is popular because it is comforting, which is worth saying out loud to a class before anyone adopts it as a plan.
True or false: Oxford University is older than the Aztec Empire.
Why ask it
True. There was teaching at Oxford before 1100, and the Aztec capital Tenochtitlan was founded in the 1300s. It catches people because they file one under old buildings still in use and the other under ancient history.
Food
True or false: a banana is a berry and a strawberry is not.
Why ask it
True, in the botanist's sense. A berry grows from a single flower's ovary with the seeds inside, which fits a banana, a grape and a tomato, while a strawberry carries its seeds on the outside and fails the test. It pairs with the tomato statement if you want everyone to give up on the fruit bowl entirely.
True or false: peanuts are nuts.
Why ask it
False. Peanuts are legumes, in the same family as peas and beans, and they grow in pods under the soil. The name is half right, which is why almost nobody questions it.
True or false: pineapples grow on trees.
Why ask it
False. A pineapple grows from the centre of a low, spiky plant that stands about waist high, one fruit at a time, and takes well over a year to get there. People picture a tree because coconuts, which share the postcard, do grow on one.
True or false: apples float in water.
Why ask it
True, because about a quarter of an apple is air. It is the whole reason apple bobbing works, and with a bowl and an apple you can settle it in front of everyone.
True or false: a ripe cranberry will bounce.
Why ask it
True. A sound, ripe cranberry has small pockets of air inside, so it bounces when dropped and floats in water, and growers have long sorted the firm fruit from the soft by bouncing it. If there is a bag in the kitchen, drop a few on the counter and let the result be the answer.
True or false: fortune cookies come from China.
Why ask it
False. They became popular in California in the early twentieth century and most likely grew out of a Japanese cracker; they are not a tradition in China. People answer true because of where they are handed one, which is a restaurant and not a country.
True or false: Caesar salad is named after Julius Caesar.
Why ask it
False. It takes its name from Caesar Cardini, an Italian-born restaurateur who is credited with creating it in Tijuana, Mexico, in the 1920s. A Roman name, an Italian cook and a Mexican city in one answer tends to need repeating.
True or false: Hawaiian pizza was invented in Canada.
Why ask it
True. The usual account credits Sam Panopoulos, a restaurant owner in Ontario, who put tinned pineapple on a pizza in the early 1960s and took the name from the brand on the tin. Whether it should have been invented is a separate vote, and the table will want to hold it.
True or false: the seeds are the hottest part of a chilli pepper.
Why ask it
False. The heat is concentrated in the pale pith that holds the seeds, and the seeds only pick it up by touching it. The cooks present may already know, since scraping out the pith is what tames a chilli.
True or false: white chocolate contains no cocoa solids.
Why ask it
True in the everyday sense. It is made from cocoa butter, the fat of the bean, with sugar and milk, and has none of the dark solids that give chocolate its colour and most of its flavour. Whether that makes it chocolate at all is an opinion, so settle the fact and let them argue the rest.
True or false: saffron is the most expensive spice in the world.
Why ask it
True, weight for weight. Each crocus flower gives only three threads, and they are picked by hand. Ask for guesses first: vanilla is the usual wrong answer and is generally ranked second, so it deserves half a nod.
True or false: carrots have always been orange.
Why ask it
False. Early farmed carrots were mostly purple or yellow, and the orange kind only took over in Europe a few centuries ago. The tale that Dutch growers bred it to honour the House of Orange is told often and is thinly supported, so pass it on as a story.
Running a True or False Round
Practical guidance for the conversation itself
How to Run It
Pick the group to suit the room
The Classics are a mixed opener for any age. Animals and Food suit younger children, who arrive with opinions on both. Science and Space and Geography and History take longer per statement, because the explanations are the point, and go best with adults or an older class. Eight to ten statements make a round, so read the Classics whole and choose from the longer groups. Two rounds is plenty for an evening.
Make everyone commit before you answer
Hands up for true, hands up for false, no abstaining. The round dies if people wait to hear what others think, and the point of the game is having been publicly wrong for four seconds.
Read the statement word for word
Several of these turn on one word: tallest from base, not highest above sea level; largest desert, not hottest; always boils, not usually. Paraphrasing changes the answer and you will lose the argument that follows.
Ask why before you confirm
Take one reason from a true voter and one from a false voter first. The reasoning is more entertaining than the answer, and it is where the actual learning happens.
Keep the order uneven
If every statement is false, the room works out the pattern by number five and votes false on everything. A strict true, false, true, false order is found out just as quickly. Each group on this page mixes myths with odd facts in an irregular run, with two or three of a kind in a row here and there, so keep some of that when you pick and choose.
Concede the arguable ones
The tomato, the sixty percent water statement and the count of human senses all have legitimate objections, and so does anything that turns on a definition, such as whether white chocolate is chocolate or whether Pluto was fairly demoted. Saying so is better than defending a number, and it keeps the pedants on your side.
Check anything you plan to score
Some answers rest on definitions that change, as Pluto's did, and some on counts that get revised. If there is a prize or a grade riding on a statement, look it up in a current reference before the round. When a player turns out to know more than the sheet does, give them the point.
Four Ways to Play
Sides of the room
True stands on one side, false on the other, wrong answers sit down. Fast, physical, and works with a large group where you cannot track scores.
Bet the point
Each player says how confident they are, one to three points, and stakes it. Rewards knowing what you do not know, which turns out to be the harder skill.
Explain to score
A correct answer earns nothing unless the player can say why. Slower, better with a small group, and the version to use in a classroom.
About the players
Swap the facts for statements about the people playing. Each person offers one about themselves, such as 'true or false: I have never broken a bone' or 'true or false: I can name every teacher I had before the age of ten', and the others vote before the truth comes out. It needs no answer sheet, and it works as an icebreaker with a new class, on a video call or over text with one friend.
What Spoils It
- Statements nobody can settle in the room. If the answer is genuinely disputed, it becomes an argument and not a round, so leave it out.
- Numbers dressed up as facts. Figures like the miles of blood vessels in a body or the lifetime volume of saliva are repeated everywhere and hard to pin down, so they make weak questions.
- Correcting someone twice. Once is the game, twice is a lecture, and the second time takes the room's energy with it.
- Politics, religion and anything a person present has a stake in. The room stops playing and starts positioning.
- Too many in a row. Read one of the longer groups straight through, never mind the whole page, and it becomes a test. By the end nobody is putting a hand up.