Snow, ice and winter weather
Four of these fifteen are easy, seven medium and four hard, and the hard ones are all records. Read each question twice and allow twenty seconds. Three answers have to be written down rather than shouted, because they are numbers: the blizzard definition wants a wind speed, a visibility and a duration, and the two snowfall records want a figure and a place. Take those on paper or you will spend the round arbitrating half-answers.
The snowflake question is the one worth stopping on, because the answer everybody knows is wrong. Nobody has ever proved that no two snowflakes are alike, and nobody could: the claim is unfalsifiable by construction. Kenneth Libbrecht, the Caltech physicist who has grown more snow crystals under controlled conditions than anyone alive, has produced pairs he describes as "very similar to one another, although they are not precisely identical". Small plain hexagonal prisms can look effectively the same. It is only the big branched crystals, the ones on the Christmas cards, whose exact structure is so intricate that a repeat is astronomically unlikely. Say all of that after you read the answer and the round earns its keep.
One question was cut from this round and it is worth knowing why. The famous fifteen-inch snowflake, supposedly seen at Fort Keogh, Montana in 1887, rests on a single rancher's account with no photograph and no instrument. Libbrecht's own largest documented crystal is about ten millimetres across. The Fort Keogh flake is folklore, so it is not on this page.
Q1.Snow is made of ice crystals, and ice is clear. So why does snow look white?Tap to reveal
Answer: Its many crystal surfaces bounce back all colours of light equally
The National Snow and Ice Data Center puts it plainly: "Most all the visible light striking the snow or ice surface is reflected back without any particular preference for a single color." Nothing is tinted, so the eye reads white. Deep snow and glacier ice look blue for the opposite reason, because thick ice absorbs the long red wavelengths and lets the blue through.
Q2.In the strict sense, what is the difference between a snow crystal and a snowflake?Tap to reveal
Answer: A snowflake can be one crystal or a whole clump of them
NSIDC: "Snowflakes are single ice crystals or clusters of ice crystals that fall from a cloud." Most of what lands on a coat sleeve is a polycrystal, several crystals stuck together, which is why real snow rarely looks like the six-pointed diagram.
Q3.What mainly decides whether a snow crystal grows as a flat plate or a slender column?Tap to reveal
Answer: The temperature it grows at
Libbrecht's laboratory work is unambiguous: thin plates near -2C, slender columns near -6C, large thin plates again near -15C. Humidity decides how elaborate the crystal gets, not its basic form: "Snow crystals grow into simpler forms when the humidity is low... More complex, branched forms appear when the humidity is high."
Q4.True or false: it has been proved that no two snowflakes are alike.Tap to reveal
Answer: False
It has never been proved and it cannot be, because nobody can inspect every snowflake. Libbrecht has grown near-twin crystals in the lab that are "very similar to one another, although they are not precisely identical". The defensible version of the claim is narrower: simple crystals can look effectively the same, and complex branched ones are so intricate that an exact repeat in nature is vanishingly unlikely.
Q5.Who took the first photographs of individual snow crystals, in Jericho, Vermont?Tap to reveal
Answer: Wilson Bentley
The Smithsonian dates it precisely: Bentley "made his first successful photomicrograph of a snow crystal on January 15, 1885". He was a farmer who bolted a bellows camera onto a microscope in an unheated shed, and he did it more than two thousand times.
Q6.What is the weather term for a snow crystal so thickly coated in frozen droplets that it lands as a soft white pellet?Tap to reveal
Answer: Graupel
The National Weather Service glossary defines graupel as the "same as snow pellets or small hail". The coating is rime: supercooled water droplets freezing onto the crystal on the way down, until the original six-sided shape has disappeared completely.
Q7.What is the difference between sleet and freezing rain?Tap to reveal
Answer: Sleet arrives already frozen; freezing rain lands as liquid and freezes on contact
NWS definitions: sleet is "pellets of ice composed of frozen or mostly frozen raindrops", while freezing rain "falls as a liquid but freezes into glaze upon contact with the ground". Freezing rain is the dangerous one, because it coats roads and power lines in clear ice rather than bouncing off them.
Q8.Under the US National Weather Service definition, a blizzard needs wind of at least what speed, visibility down to what, for how long?Tap to reveal
Answer: 35 mph, a quarter of a mile, and three hours
The glossary wording is exact: "sustained wind or frequent gusts to 35 miles an hour or greater" plus "considerable falling and/or blowing snow (i.e., reducing visibility frequently to less than 1/4 mile)" for "a period of 3 hours or longer". Note what is missing: there is no snowfall total in the definition at all. A blizzard can be made entirely of old snow picked up off the ground.
Q9.A nor'easter is named after what?Tap to reveal
Answer: The direction its strongest winds blow from
NOAA's satellite service explains the name as "the direction from which the strongest winds typically blow", which is northeast, off the Atlantic. The storm itself tracks up the coast, so the name describes the wind, not the journey.
Q10.What conditions produce lake-effect snow?Tap to reveal
Answer: Cold air crossing relatively warm open lake water
NOAA: "Lake effect snow forms when cold air passes over the warmer waters of a lake," picking up moisture that falls out downwind. The band is usually narrow and close in, normally dropping its snow not far inland, though it can reach a hundred, which is why one Great Lakes suburb gets buried while the next town over stays clear.
Q11.What is the greatest snow depth ever measured at a US weather station?Tap to reveal
Answer: 451 inches, at Tamarack, California, in March 1911
That is a little over 37 feet of standing snow, and it remains the official US record recognised by NOAA. Tamarack sat above 8,000 feet in the Sierra Nevada, where the same storms that bury the range still deliver most of California's water supply.
Q12.Which US ski area holds the official record for the most snow in a single season?Tap to reveal
Answer: Mount Baker Ski Area, Washington, with 1,140 inches in 1998-99
NOAA's National Climate Extremes Committee verified the figure for the season running to June 1999, and it displaced Mount Rainier's 1,122 inches from 1971-72. Being a verified single-season record is the qualifier that matters: unofficial and unverified totals elsewhere run higher.
Q13.True or false: it can be too cold to snow.Tap to reveal
Answer: False
Very cold air holds very little water vapour, so heavy falls are rare in extreme cold and most big snowstorms arrive with surface temperatures near -9C or warmer. But snow does not stop. Diamond dust, which NSIDC describes as "slowly falling, very small, unbranched crystals of ice" that can fall "from high clouds or even from a cloudless sky", is snow falling in some of the coldest air on the planet.
Q14.What turns some summer snowfields pink, in what is nicknamed watermelon snow?Tap to reveal
Answer: Snow algae carrying a red pigment
These are cold-loving green algae whose red carotenoid pigment acts as sunscreen at altitude. The species was long given as Chlamydomonas nivalis, but a 2019 study identified the dominant red-snow organism as Sanguina nivaloides instead, so the old textbook name is now the wrong one.
Q15.What is old compacted granular snow called once it is on its way to becoming glacier ice?Tap to reveal
Answer: Firn
NSIDC's sequence runs fresh snow to neve to firn to glacial ice, with firn being the stage that has survived a full melt season. It matters more than it sounds: the USGS puts about 68.7 per cent of all the fresh water on Earth in ice caps and glaciers, which all began as snow.
The Winter Olympics and winter sport
Five easy, seven medium, three hard. This is the round to run second, while the room is still sharp, because six of the questions turn on a year or a number and those go badly once people have relaxed. Take the curling question in writing: it wants two numbers, eight stones and ten ends, and teams reliably give one and stop.
One answer has been rewritten since the last Games and it is worth knowing before you read the alpine skiing questions aloud. For decades the five Olympic alpine events were downhill, super-G, slalom, giant slalom and combined. At Milano Cortina 2026 the individual combined was gone, replaced by a team combined. If someone at your table answers with the old list, they are describing Beijing 2022 correctly, so give them the point and explain the change.
Three good questions did not make the fifteen because they need more setting up than a quiz round allows. Eddie the Eagle, Britain's ski jumper at Calgary 1988, finished last in both his events, and in the normal hill his 69.2 points were less than half the total of the man above him, which is a lovely fact and a dull question. Jamaica's bobsleigh team debuted at those same Calgary Games. And Midori Ito became the first woman to land a triple axel in international competition at the 1988 NHK Trophy, which is precise enough to be a question only if you say "international" out loud, because accounts of an earlier domestic attempt muddy it.
Q1.Which French town hosted the event now recognised as the first Winter Olympics?Tap to reveal
Answer: Chamonix, in 1924
It was not billed as an Olympics at the time. It ran as an International Winter Sports Week, and only afterwards, in 1926, did it "officially receive the title of the 'First Winter Olympic Games'". Every Winter Games count since is measured back to an event nobody attended as an Olympics.
Q2.Which sport produced the very first gold medal of the first Winter Olympics?Tap to reveal
Answer: Speed skating - Charles Jewtraw of the USA won the 500m
The IOC's own account dates it to the morning of 26 January 1924, making Jewtraw "the first gold medallist of the Olympic Winter Games". He never won another, and the medal ended up in the Smithsonian.
Q3.Which winter sport was contested at the Summer Olympics sixteen years before the Winter Games existed?Tap to reveal
Answer: Figure skating
It debuted at London 1908, on artificial ice, and came back at Antwerp 1920, where ice hockey also made its Olympic debut. Both sports moved to the new Winter programme in 1924, which is why hockey's first Olympic champions, Canada's Winnipeg Falcons, are technically summer Olympians.
Q4.Why were there only two years between the 1992 and 1994 Winter Olympics?Tap to reveal
Answer: The IOC moved the Winter Games off the Summer Games' year
Lillehammer 1994 was the first Winter Games held in a different year from the Summer Olympics, and the only time the gap between two Winter Games was two years rather than four. The split gave each set of Games its own sponsorship and broadcast cycle, which is the real reason it happened.
Q5.At which Games did snowboarding make its Olympic debut?Tap to reveal
Answer: Nagano 1998
The programme was men's and women's giant slalom and halfpipe. The sport arrived in some disarray, with a dispute between the IOC's chosen governing body and snowboarding's own federation that kept several of the best riders away.
Q6.Which sliding sport is raced head-first and face-down?Tap to reveal
Answer: Skeleton
Luge is the other way round, feet-first and lying on the back. Skeleton is also the older Olympic event of the two: the first Olympic skeleton gold, at St Moritz in 1928, went to an American, Jennison Heaton.
Q7.Nearly all championship curling stones are quarried from one small island off the Scottish coast. Which?Tap to reveal
Answer: Ailsa Craig
Its granite has been used in every official Olympic curling event, and a single firm, Kay's of Scotland, holds access to the quarries. The rock matters because Ailsa Craig granite absorbs almost no water, so the striking surface does not crack when it freezes.
Q8.In curling, how many stones does each team deliver per end, and how many ends make a standard Olympic game?Tap to reveal
Answer: Eight stones, and ten ends
Two stones per player, four players per team. The target circles are the house, and the advantage of throwing the last stone of an end is the hammer, which is the single biggest tactical asset in the game.
Q9.Which Olympic sport pairs cross-country skiing with rifle shooting?Tap to reveal
Answer: Biathlon
It descends from Scandinavian military ski patrols, and the shooting is what makes it watchable: athletes arrive at the range with their heart rate near maximum and have to hold still enough to hit a target 50 metres away.
Q10.Which Olympic sport combines ski jumping with cross-country skiing?Tap to reveal
Answer: Nordic combined
The International Ski Federation presents it as the sport that brings ski jumping and cross-country skiing together. The jump sets the start order and the time gaps, then the race decides it, so the leader after the jump starts first and gets chased.
Q11.In Olympic ski jumping, how many judges award style marks, and what happens to their scores?Tap to reveal
Answer: Five judges, and the highest and lowest are thrown away
Each can award up to 20 points, so with the outliers dropped the maximum style score is 60. Those points are added to distance points pegged to the hill's K-point, which is why a shorter, cleaner jump can beat a longer, scrappier one.
Q12.Which piece of equipment broke almost every speed skating world record in a single season in the late 1990s?Tap to reveal
Answer: The clap skate
The blade hinges at the toe and detaches at the heel, keeping it flat on the ice through the whole push. Almost every world record in the men's and women's events fell during that first full season on the new blade.
Q13.Has the Winter Olympics ever been held in the Southern Hemisphere?Tap to reveal
Answer: No
Not once since 1924. The obvious obstacle is the calendar: a February Games falls in high summer south of the equator, and the Southern Hemisphere's reliable snow sits in a handful of ranges in Chile, Argentina and New Zealand rather than around the large cities that can host.
Q14.Which country leads the all-time Winter Olympic medal table?Tap to reveal
Answer: Norway
Norway has led in both total medals and total golds for years, and stretched the lead at Milano Cortina 2026, taking 41 medals including 18 golds - the most golds any nation has won at a single Winter Olympics. Cumulative all-time totals get restated as historical results are reviewed, which is why this question asks who leads rather than by exactly how much.
Q15."Slalom" is borrowed straight from Norwegian. What does it literally mean?Tap to reveal
Answer: Sloping track
From sla, slope, plus lam, track. It entered English in 1921 for a "downhill zig-zag obstacle race in skiing". "Ski" is Norwegian too, from Old Norse skid, a "long snowshoe" but literally "stick of wood, firewood".
Animals in winter
Four easy, seven medium, four hard. This is the round that works best with children in the room, because the answers are creatures rather than dates, and it is also the round where the reveal is worth more than the point. Read the explanation aloud every time here, even if you skip it elsewhere.
Question one needs a ruling before you read it. The strict answer is that a bear in its den is not hibernating, it is in torpor: the National Park Service describes a bear's winter sleep as a lighter state than true hibernation, because its body temperature does not fall the way a ground squirrel's does, and a bear can be roused. But this is live ground in biology, and a number of researchers now argue that bears meet a reasonable definition of hibernation and that the textbook definition was drawn too tightly around rodents. Mark it right if a team says torpor, and mark it right if a team argues the case for hibernation and can say why. What is simply wrong is the picture of a bear switched off for four months.
Three more questions could have gone in and did not. Bats are the true hibernators most people never think of, with "metabolism, heart rate, and body temperature all dropping". Ladybirds pile into house vents and attics in aggregations rather than seeing the winter out alone. And muskox underwool, qiviut, is several times warmer than sheep's wool, though the exact multiplier you see quoted is marketing rather than measurement.
Q1.In the strict sense, is a black bear in its winter den hibernating?Tap to reveal
Answer: No - it is in torpor, a much shallower state
The National Park Service treats a bear's winter sleep as torpor rather than true hibernation. A bear's temperature falls by a few degrees, not tens of degrees, and it can wake and move. Some biologists now argue bears should count as hibernators after all, so treat this as a question with a preferred answer rather than a closed one.
Q2.Which small mammal is the textbook true hibernator, with a core body temperature that falls below freezing?Tap to reveal
Answer: The arctic ground squirrel
Published research recorded body temperatures around -2.9C, the lowest known in any mammal, and the Park Service puts the swing at 99F down to as low as 27F. It does not freeze: it supercools, holding its body fluids liquid below their normal freezing point.
Q3.At what time of year are black bear cubs born?Tap to reveal
Answer: In midwinter, while the mother is dormant in the den
The Park Service is specific: "Black bear cubs are born in January, while their mother is dormant." They are born tiny and blind, and she nurses them in the den for months on reserves she built up the previous autumn, without eating or drinking herself.
Q4.Which North American bird was the first found to hibernate, going torpid for weeks at a time?Tap to reveal
Answer: The common poorwill
Audubon calls it "famous as the first known hibernating bird", discovered in the 1940s, tucked into a rock crevice in the Californian desert. Plenty of other birds use brief nightly torpor; weeks of continuous dormancy is the poorwill's trick.
Q5.Which North American frog survives the winter with much of its body water turned to ice?Tap to reveal
Answer: The wood frog
Its liver floods the body with glucose, which works as antifreeze inside the cells while ice forms outside them. A frozen wood frog has, in one researcher's words, "no beating heart or brain activity or anything, until you decide to thaw it".
Q6.What triggers the snowshoe hare's change from brown to white?Tap to reveal
Answer: Day length, not snowfall
The moult runs on the calendar, which is fine until the calendar and the weather disagree. In warm years the hares turn white before the snow arrives, or stay white after it melts, leaving them conspicuous on bare ground - a mismatch that researchers now track as a climate signal.
Q7.A stoat in its white winter coat was known to the fur trade by which name?Tap to reveal
Answer: Ermine
Same animal, different season. The black tail tip stays black all winter, which is the row of dark flecks on the ceremonial robes the fur was made into - each fleck is the tip of one animal's tail.
Q8.What changes colour in a reindeer's eye between summer and winter?Tap to reveal
Answer: The tapetum, the reflective layer behind the retina - gold in summer, deep blue in winter
Research published by the Royal Society traced it to pressure changes inside the eye during the long polar night. The blue winter state scatters more light back through the retina and, as Audubon summarises it, "probably improves a reindeer's chances of seeing moving predators in the dark".
Q9.Honeybees do not hibernate. So how does a hive get through the winter?Tap to reveal
Answer: The bees form a tight cluster and shiver their flight muscles
They uncouple the wings and vibrate the muscles to generate heat, holding the middle of the cluster warm enough to survive while bees rotate between the warm core and the cold outside. The fuel is the honey they spent the summer storing, which is the reason a hive makes far more than it needs.
Q10.In most bumblebee species, who survives the winter?Tap to reveal
Answer: Only the newly mated young queens
The Xerces Society is blunt about the rest: the colony "will die off with the first hard frosts". Each surviving queen digs her own shallow chamber, a few centimetres down, and overwinters entirely alone before starting a new colony from nothing in spring.
Q11.Which bird breeds through the Antarctic winter, with the male taking on the incubation?Tap to reveal
Answer: The emperor penguin
The Australian Antarctic Program calls them "the only animals that breed during the Antarctic winter", and notes that "only the males take on the incubation duties". He balances the single egg on his feet under a fold of skin for about two months, in a huddle, in the dark, while the female feeds at sea.
Q12.Do beavers hibernate?Tap to reveal
Answer: No - they stay active all winter
Vermont's Fish and Wildlife Department notes that beavers do not hibernate, which is why they lay in a food store. They just stop going outside: the lodge entrance is underwater, and the food is a raft of branches jammed into the mud of the pond bottom in autumn, reachable under the ice.
Q13.How does a black-capped chickadee survive a winter night?Tap to reveal
Answer: By letting its own body temperature fall - regulated nocturnal hypothermia
Measured drops run around 10C below its normal night-time temperature, a controlled shutdown rather than an accident. The same bird caches hundreds of seeds each autumn, and its hippocampus grows in the same season, because more of the new neurons it makes survive.
Q14.When a grey squirrel digs up a nut in winter, what is it mainly using?Tap to reveal
Answer: Spatial memory
In cache-recovery experiments squirrels found the real cache around 86 per cent of the time and were only fooled by decoys placed within about five centimetres. Smell helps at close range, but a scatter-hoarder with thousands of separate caches under snow is navigating by memory.
Q15.What is a caribou's hoof shaped for?Tap to reveal
Answer: Spreading wide to carry the animal over snow
Alaska's Department of Fish and Game describes "large, concave hoofs that spread widely to support the animal in snow and soft tundra". The same feet double as paddles: caribou are strong swimmers and cross rivers and lakes on migration.
The science of cold and the solstice
Four easy, seven medium, four hard, and the hardest are the two temperature records and the Antarctic precipitation figure. All three need writing down, and all three need their qualifier read out, because a record without its qualifier is usually false. The coldest reading on Earth depends entirely on whether you mean a thermometer in an instrument shelter or a satellite looking at the snow surface, and those are different numbers measuring different things.
The head question is the myth-killer of the page. You do not lose most of your body heat through your head. Heat leaves wherever skin is uncovered - the National Weather Service defines wind chill itself as "the rate of heat loss from exposed skin caused by wind and cold" - and an adult head is a small share of total body surface, so it cannot be where most of the loss happens. A hat is still worth wearing, for the ordinary reason that it covers skin you would otherwise leave bare.
One famous claim was left off deliberately. The Mpemba effect, the idea that hot water freezes faster than cold, is not settled science: later work found the result depends heavily on where and how you measure, and it does not reproduce robustly. It is a fine thing to argue about after the quiz and a bad thing to award a point for.
Q1.Is the winter solstice a day or a moment?Tap to reveal
Answer: A moment
It is the instant the Sun stands directly over the Tropic of Capricorn, which falls somewhere between 20 and 22 December. Because it is an instant in universal time, the local calendar date differs between time zones, and the leap-year cycle shifts it about as well.
Q2.Does the earliest sunset of the year happen on the winter solstice?Tap to reveal
Answer: No - it happens weeks earlier
Around 40 degrees north the earliest sunset comes in the first half of December and the latest sunrise in early January, with the shortest day between them. The cause is the equation of time: through December a solar noon-to-noon day runs about half a minute longer than the 24-hour clock day, and that drift pulls the three events apart.
Q3.In which month is Earth closest to the Sun?Tap to reveal
Answer: January
Perihelion falls in the first days of January, at about 147 million kilometres, in the depths of Northern Hemisphere winter - which is the neatest possible proof that distance is not what makes seasons. The cause is the 23.4-degree tilt of Earth's axis, which the US Naval Observatory defines as the offset between the axis of rotation and a perpendicular to the orbital plane. The orbit does leave a fingerprint, though: Earth moves fastest when closest, so northern winter runs about five days shorter than northern summer.
Q4.Antarctica holds most of the ice on Earth. How much precipitation does its high interior plateau get in a year?Tap to reveal
Answer: Less than 50 mm of water equivalent - desert amounts
The Australian Antarctic Program calls Antarctica "the coldest, windiest and driest continent on Earth", puts snow accumulation across the whole continent at "about 150 mm of water per year", and adds that "over the elevated plateau, the annual value is less than 50 mm". The ice sheet is kilometres thick not because it snows heavily but because nothing ever melts.
Q5.What does the Latin behind the word "solstice" literally describe?Tap to reveal
Answer: The Sun standing still
From sol, the sun, plus sistere, "stand still", because the Sun's noon height stops climbing or falling and appears to pause before reversing. Old English had already Englished the idea once, as "sunstead", before the Latin form arrived through French in the mid-thirteenth century.
Q6.What is the lowest air temperature ever recorded by a thermometer at a weather station on Earth?Tap to reveal
Answer: -89.2C (-128.6F), at Vostok in Antarctica, on 21 July 1983
The World Meteorological Organization still holds this as the world record for a directly measured air temperature. Satellites have since read snow-surface temperatures in East Antarctic hollows down into the -90s C, but that is the radiating temperature of the snow rather than air measured in an instrument shelter, so it does not replace Vostok - it is a different quantity. For scale, the floor is absolute zero at -273.15C, or -459.67F, or zero kelvin.
Q7.Where was the Northern Hemisphere's coldest temperature recorded?Tap to reveal
Answer: Greenland - -69.6C at the Klinck automatic station, on 22 December 1991
The WMO verified it decades after the fact, and it displaced the readings everyone had grown up quoting: "the value of -67.8C recorded at the Russian sites of Verkhoyansk (February 1892) and Oimekon (January 1933)". Klinck sat above 3,000 metres on the ice sheet, and nobody noticed the number until investigators went back through the archive.
Q8.The origin of the word "winter" is not settled. Which of the two long-proposed meanings is still standing?Tap to reveal
Answer: "The white season"
Two candidates have been offered for centuries: winter as the windy season, from the root of "wind", or winter as the white season, from the same root as Gaulish vindo- and Old Irish find, "white". Etymonline lists both as "serious candidates" but then rules one out - the old connection with wind is "phonetically impossible" - which leaves white in front without proving it.
Q9.Why does ice float, so that a lake freezes from the top down?Tap to reveal
Answer: Water is densest at about 4C, not at its freezing point
The USGS: "Pure water reaches its maximum density at about 4 degrees C", and on freezing "the density of ice decreases by about 9 percent". So the coldest water rises, freezes at the surface, and the resulting lid insulates everything underneath - which is the only reason fish survive a hard winter.
Q10.December has the shortest days, so why is January usually the colder month?Tap to reveal
Answer: Seasonal lag
Land and ocean keep releasing heat absorbed earlier in the year, so the temperature minimum trails the sunlight minimum by weeks. NOAA's climatologists use exactly that term for it, and the same lag on the other side is why the hottest weather comes well after the June solstice.
Q11.What core body temperature marks the start of hypothermia?Tap to reveal
Answer: Below 35C, or 95F
The CDC uses that threshold. It is only about two degrees Celsius below normal, which is the point: hypothermia does not need Arctic conditions, and most cases in temperate countries happen in air well above freezing, often wet and windy.
Q12.True or false: you lose most of your body heat through your head.Tap to reveal
Answer: False
Heat goes from whatever skin is uncovered. The National Weather Service defines wind chill as "the rate of heat loss from exposed skin caused by wind and cold", and the head is a modest fraction of an adult's total skin area, so it cannot account for most of the loss. Wear the hat anyway - it covers bare skin, which is the whole mechanism.
Q13.Does wind chill lower the actual air temperature?Tap to reveal
Answer: No
It describes how fast exposed skin loses heat, not how cold the air is. The National Weather Service spells out the consequence: an "inanimate object will NOT cool below the actual air temperature", which is why your car's coolant does not freeze at the wind chill figure and why wind chill is meaningless in still air.
Q14.Why is snow such a good thing to shelter in?Tap to reveal
Answer: Because it is mostly air, which makes it an insulator
NSIDC: "Snow is a good insulator, similar to the insulation in the ceiling of a house, and thus slows the flow of heat." Most of the volume of fresh uncompacted snow is trapped air. That is what keeps ground-level temperatures survivable for voles and shrews tunnelling underneath it, and what makes a snow shelter work.
Q15.How does frost appear on a window without any liquid water forming first?Tap to reveal
Answer: By deposition - water vapour turning straight to ice
The National Weather Service describes hoar frost as "a deposit of interlocking crystals formed by direct sublimation", which happens when air with a dew point below freezing is cooled to saturation. There is no dew stage to freeze: the vapour skips the liquid step entirely, which is why frost grows as feathery crystals rather than beads.
Winter in film, books and music
Five easy, eight medium, two hard - the gentlest round on the page, and the one to finish on. Two answers need writing down because they are two-part: the song question wants a pair of songwriters, and the train question wants a film and the graphic novel it came from. Everything else can be shouted.
This round deliberately avoids Christmas. Winter on screen is a much bigger subject than December, and the obvious festive answers all live on our Christmas pages already. So the films here are the cold ones rather than the cosy ones: a shape-shifter in Antarctica, a train circling a frozen planet, a mammoth in an ice age. If your table wants the December canon instead, take the Christmas movie set from the related list and run it as a sixth round.
Three good candidates were cut for sourcing rather than interest. The Empire Strikes Back shot its ice planet on a Norwegian glacier and Doctor Zhivago faked its Russian winter in Spain - both are well-known production history, but we could not put either in front of a citable source we were happy with, so neither is a question here. The same goes for the story that "Let It Snow" was written during a Los Angeles heat wave: it is a songwriters' anecdote that gets repeated as fact, and it is Christmas-adjacent anyway.
Three films that did not need questions but are worth naming if the round runs short. Groundhog Day is set in Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania but was shot in Woodstock, Illinois, which the city itself still advertises. Force Majeure turns a family holiday in the French Alps inside out with a single avalanche. And Wind River sets a murder investigation on a Wyoming reservation in deep snow, where the cold is a plot mechanism rather than scenery.
Q1.Disney's Frozen is loosely based on which Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale?Tap to reveal
Answer: The Snow Queen
Loosely is the word. Disney circled the story for decades and kept abandoning it, because Andersen's tale has no heroine in the Disney sense, no romance, and a title villain who barely appears - the children in it are called Kay and Gerda. What survived is the frozen setting. Fans have long noticed that Hans, Kristoff, Anna and Sven together sound like Hans Christian Andersen, though Disney has never confirmed that was deliberate.
Q2.Who wrote "Let It Go", and did it win an Oscar?Tap to reveal
Answer: Kristen Anderson-Lopez and Robert Lopez - and yes, Best Original Song
The Academy's record for the 86th Academy Awards lists it exactly that way. Idina Menzel sings it in the film as Elsa, and the song rewrote the plot: the writers produced it while Elsa was still conceived as a villain, and it was too sympathetic for that, so the character was changed to fit the song.
Q3.In The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, what does the White Witch use to win Edmund over?Tap to reveal
Answer: Enchanted Turkish delight
She has held Narnia in a hundred-year winter, and her weapon against a child is a sweet. It lands harder in context: Lewis published in 1950, in a Britain where sweets were still rationed and would be for another three years.
Q4.Which concerto of Vivaldi's The Four Seasons is "Winter", and in what key?Tap to reveal
Answer: The fourth, in F minor
Op. 8, RV 297. Vivaldi published the set with sonnets meant to be read alongside the music, which makes the writing easy to follow: the shivering, the stamping of feet, and the passage where you are meant to hear someone walking carefully on ice and then falling over.
Q5.Tchaikovsky's First Symphony carries which wintry nickname?Tap to reveal
Answer: Winter Daydreams
Symphony No. 1 in G minor, Op. 13. The titles are his own rather than a publisher's invention: the first movement is "Daydreams on a Winter Journey" and the second "Land of Gloom, Land of Mist". He was in his mid-twenties and it nearly broke him to write.
Q6.Schubert's song cycle Winterreise sets 24 poems by which poet?Tap to reveal
Answer: Wilhelm Müller
Schubert found twelve of them in an almanac and set those, then discovered Müller had since published twelve more and set those too - which is why the cycle still falls into two halves. It is a winter journey with no destination: the traveller simply walks away from a town and keeps going.
Q7.Which Shakespeare play opens with the line "Now is the winter of our discontent"?Tap to reveal
Answer: Richard III
It is the play's very first speech. The half-line everybody quotes is only half the sentence: "Now is the winter of our discontent / Made glorious summer by this son of York." Richard is saying the bad times are over, which makes the modern use of the phrase almost exactly backwards.
Q8.Which Shakespeare play contains the stage direction that sends a character offstage pursued by a bear?Tap to reveal
Answer: The Winter's Tale
Act 3, Scene 3, and the character is Antigonus, who does not come back. The Folger edition modernises it as "He exits, pursued by a bear"; older texts give the more famous form. Scholars still argue over whether the original staging used a costume or a real bear from the London bear pits nearby.
Q9.Which Jack London story ends with a man freezing to death in the Yukon after failing to light a fire?Tap to reveal
Answer: "To Build a Fire"
London quantifies the cold instead of describing it - "seventy-five degrees below zero" - and the story's cruelty is structural: the man dies of a series of small, reasonable decisions, and the dog that has been with him all along survives and moves on.
Q10.In Edith Wharton's Ethan Frome, what causes the crash that ends the novel?Tap to reveal
Answer: A sledding run aimed at an elm tree
It is a deliberate act rather than an accident, which is what makes the ending so bleak: it fails, and everyone survives it. Wharton lays the groundwork early by noting that other people in the village had already come close to hitting the same elm.
Q11.Hans Christian Andersen's "The Little Match Girl" is set on which night of the year?Tap to reveal
Answer: New Year's Eve
The text is explicit - "Evening came on, the last evening of the year... for it was New Year's eve" - and almost every retelling moves her to Christmas Eve instead, because a dying child fits the Christmas card better than the calendar does.
Q12.In which 1982 John Carpenter film is a research team in Antarctica hunted by a shape-shifting alien?Tap to reveal
Answer: The Thing
The isolation is the whole premise: nobody can leave, nobody can be trusted, and the cold is what keeps the door shut. It flopped on release, in the same summer as a far friendlier film about an alien, and took years to be recognised.
Q13.Which Bong Joon-ho film is set on a train circling a frozen Earth, and what was it adapted from?Tap to reveal
Answer: Snowpiercer, from the French graphic novel Le Transperceneige
The original comic is by Jacques Lob and Jean-Marc Rochette. The frozen world is self-inflicted in both versions - an attempt to engineer the climate that works far too well - and the train's carriages are a class system you can walk through from back to front.
Q14.Which 2002 animated film sends a mammoth, a sloth and a sabre-toothed tiger to return a human baby?Tap to reveal
Answer: Ice Age
Manny, Sid and Diego, in a film whose setting is a real geological period rather than an invented one. Its most memorable character was an afterthought: Scrat, the squirrel with the acorn, has no part in the plot at all.
Q15.Robert Frost's "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening" ends with which line, said twice?Tap to reveal
Answer: "And miles to go before I sleep"
The repetition is the poem. The first time it is a journey and a bedtime; the second time it is obviously something larger, Frost never settled the question and pushed back on readings that made the repeat carry more than it had to.
Hosting a winter trivia night
Seventy-five questions is a full evening, not a warm-up. Read each question twice, allow twenty seconds, and a round of fifteen takes twelve to fourteen minutes plus three or four to mark. The whole page runs about ninety minutes with a break in the middle. To shorten it, drop whole rounds rather than thinning each one: thinning flattens the difficulty curve and the night stops building.
Teams of three to five work best. Below three the specialist rounds feel unfair - the Olympics round in particular rewards one person who happens to have watched - and above six, half the table stops contributing. One point per question, no half points, nothing for spelling, and teams swap sheets so nobody marks their own.
Ten answers on this page are numbers or two-part answers, and those must be written down rather than shouted: the blizzard definition, the two snowfall records, the two coldest-temperature records, the curling stones and ends, the ski jumping judges, the solstice earliest-sunset question, the "Let It Go" songwriters, and the Snowpiercer film-plus-source. Announce that rule before the first round and you will not have to argue it during one.
Read the explanation aloud after each answer rather than saving them to the end. On this page the explanation is usually the point: the snowflake question is a bad question and a very good thirty seconds of talking, and the same is true of the bear, the head and the coldest place on Earth. The sheet prints either way, questions only or with the answer key, so the answers can stay at the front of the room.
Five winter claims that keep being repeated
No two snowflakes are alike is the one everybody says and nobody can support. It is unfalsifiable: there is no way to inspect every snowflake, so the statement cannot be proved and has never been. What can be said is narrower and more interesting. Kenneth Libbrecht at Caltech has grown crystals side by side under matched conditions and produced pairs that are "very similar to one another, although they are not precisely identical". Simple small crystals - plain hexagonal prisms - can look effectively the same to any observer. It is only the big branched crystals that are so structurally intricate that an exact repeat in nature is astronomically unlikely. That is a claim about complexity, not a law of nature.
Bears do not hibernate, in the strict sense the word was defined for rodents. The National Park Service puts a bear's winter sleep in a lighter category than true hibernation, because the body temperature does not fall the way a hibernating ground squirrel's does, from around 99F to as low as 27F. A bear in torpor cools by a few degrees, can be roused, and gives birth and nurses cubs while dormant. That said, this is genuinely contested ground now, and a number of researchers argue that bears meet a fair definition of hibernation and that the old definition was drawn too tightly. Both of those are defensible. The picture that is simply wrong is the bear switched off until spring.
You do not lose most of your body heat through your head. Heat leaves the body through whatever skin is uncovered, which is why the National Weather Service defines wind chill as "the rate of heat loss from exposed skin caused by wind and cold" rather than as a property of any one body part. An adult head is a modest share of total skin area and cannot be where the majority of the loss happens. The figures people quote - forty, forty-five per cent - come from tests where the head was the only part left uncovered, which is a result about clothing rather than about heads. Wear the hat. It works for the ordinary reason.
The coldest place on Earth has two answers, and they measure different things. The World Meteorological Organization's world record for an air temperature measured by a thermometer at a station is -89.2C, at Vostok in Antarctica, on 21 July 1983. Satellites looking at East Antarctica have recorded snow-surface temperatures in the -90s C, colder than any ground reading, but that is the radiating temperature of the snow rather than air in an instrument shelter - a different quantity, not a new record. The Northern Hemisphere figure moved recently and most reference books have not caught up: the WMO verified -69.6C at the Klinck automatic station in Greenland on 22 December 1991, displacing "the value of -67.8C recorded at the Russian sites of Verkhoyansk (February 1892) and Oimekon (January 1933)".
It is never too cold to snow. Very cold air holds very little water vapour, so heavy snow is rare at extreme cold and most big falls arrive with surface air near -9C or warmer - but the snow does not stop. Diamond dust, which NSIDC describes as "slowly falling, very small, unbranched crystals of ice" that can appear "from high clouds or even from a cloudless sky", is snow falling in some of the coldest air on the planet.
One record on this page carries a footnote and one famous record was left off entirely. The official US 24-hour snowfall figure, 75.8 inches at Silver Lake, Colorado in April 1921, is still the NOAA record, but it was prorated from a 27.5-hour total and climatologists have published doubts about the observer - so it is not used as a question here. The fifteen-inch snowflake supposedly seen at Fort Keogh, Montana in 1887 rests on one rancher's account with no photograph and no instrument, against a largest documented crystal of about ten millimetres, so it is folklore rather than a record and is not on this page at all.
Which questions to hold back for a tiebreak
A tiebreak exists to end an argument, not to start one. That rules out anything contested or needing a judgement call, and rules in numbers and dates, marked nearest without going over.
Four questions here do the job cleanly. The coldest thermometer reading on Earth, -89.2C at Vostok on 21 July 1983, is exact, dated and undisputed. The Mount Baker single-season snowfall record, 1,140 inches, is a verified figure every team will guess at. The Tamarack snow depth, 451 inches, works the same way. And the blizzard definition - 35 mph, a quarter of a mile, three hours - has three numbers, so partial credit breaks the tie without anyone needing to be exactly right.
Three to keep out of a tiebreak, all of them fine mid-round. The bear question has a preferred answer rather than a settled one. The Silver Lake 24-hour snowfall record has a published dispute attached to it. And the satellite temperature readings in Antarctica depend on which quantity you agree to measure, which is the last argument you want at the end of a close evening.
Adapting the set for a classroom, an office, a party or a family table
In a classroom this page is more useful as science than as a quiz. The snow round, the animals round and the solstice round are each a claim, a source and a correction, and three of them - the snowflake, the bear and the head - are exercises in how a plausible fact gets repeated until it sounds settled. Run it as teams by table, ten to fifteen questions in a lesson, with no elimination and no running total on the board.
In an office, cap it at twenty minutes and pick for reach rather than depth. The Winter Olympics round travels well: it is the one set of references a mixed international team will genuinely share. The US snowfall records and the nor'easter question do not, so cut them or read the answer as a fact rather than scoring it.
At a party, and particularly one where people have been drinking, shorten everything: rounds of five or six, read twice, answers immediately, no cumulative scoring after the second round. Hand out a printed sheet rather than holding the room by voice - paper keeps working when the room gets loud, and the numeric answers on this page are exactly the ones that get mangled by shouting.
At a family table, make it a conversation instead of a contest. The animals round is built for this: let the youngest player answer first, read the explanation every time, and give the point for anything close. Bears, wood frogs and emperor penguins carry a table of mixed ages better than any other round here, and the science round works as the follow-up because every answer in it is a why.
Frequently Asked Questions
How long does it take to run 75 winter trivia questions?
About ninety minutes for the full page with a break, reading each question twice, allowing twenty seconds and marking between rounds. A round of fifteen takes twelve to fourteen minutes plus three or four to mark. With only half an hour, run two whole rounds rather than a third of each - thinning the rounds flattens the difficulty curve and the evening stops building.
How many questions should I use, and what team size works best?
Fifteen to thirty for a family table or an office, forty-five to seventy-five for a full quiz night, ten to fifteen for a classroom lesson. Teams of three to five: below three the Olympics round feels unfair to anyone who does not follow winter sport, and above six the quieter half of the table stops contributing.
How is this different from your Christmas trivia?
It deliberately avoids Christmas entirely. Nothing here is about the holiday, the songs, the films or the traditions - it is snow and weather, the Winter Olympics, animals in winter, the physics of cold and the solstice, and winter on screen and on the page. If you want the December canon, the Christmas sets in the related list cover it, and the two pages can be run back to back without a single repeated question.
Is this quiz suitable for children?
The animals round and most of the snow round are, and they are the two to use. The Olympics round leans on years and hosts, and the cold-science round on temperature records, and a child will score close to nothing on either. In a classroom, the better use of this page is as science: the snowflake, bear and body-heat questions are all worked examples of a false fact that everybody repeats.
Do bears really hibernate?
Not in the strict sense the word was defined for rodents. The National Park Service says bears "aren't true hibernators because their body temperatures don't drop during the winter" the way a ground squirrel's does - falling from about 99F to as low as 27F. A bear in torpor cools by a few degrees, can wake, and gives birth in the den. But this is live scientific ground: some researchers now argue bears do qualify and that the old definition was too narrow. What is definitely wrong is the idea of a bear switched off until spring.
Is it true that no two snowflakes are alike?
Nobody has proved it and nobody can, because you would have to inspect every snowflake. Kenneth Libbrecht at Caltech has grown near-twin crystals under matched conditions that are "very similar to one another, although they are not precisely identical". Small simple crystals can look effectively the same; it is the big branched ones whose exact structure is so intricate that a repeat in nature is astronomically unlikely. That is a statement about complexity rather than a law.
Can I print these questions and answers?
Yes. The page prints as a question sheet on its own or with the answer key included, so the answers can stay at the front of the room. It is free and there is no account.
