The China Teaching Web

Level: Beginner to Advanced

Having a trivia contest can be a good way to stimulate some healthy competition amongst your students and have some great fun! Just make sure you are using appropriate questions for the levels that you are teaching.

Warmup: Introduce the world ‘trivia’ to your students and tell them about some well known trivia television shows. (Jeopardy, Who Wants to be a Millionaire, etc). Ask your students if there are similar shows in China?

 Discussion:

Divide your students up into groups and hand out a list of trivia questions to each group. Explain that the groups will have 15 minutes to think about the questions and discuss them amongst themselves. After 15 minutes, you will rotate the questions amongst the groups and keep track of right and wrong answers. At the end of the contest, you will declare a winner. If there is a tie at the end of the contest, ask the tied teams to leave the room and instruct the other teams to come up with questions for the tie breaker.

Making up questions is not difficult. Just think of basic trivia that you learned in high school or college. Here are some examples:

1.  
   1. How many planets are there in our Universe?
   2. Who was the first President of the United States?
   3. What are the three largest cities in China?
   4. What do the letters ‘U.N.’ stand for?
   5. What is the largest continent in the world?
   6. The Beatles were from which country?
   7. Who was the first man to walk on the moon?
   8. What is the capital city of Italy?
   9. At what temperatures does water freeze and boil?
   10. What is the name of the largest river in the world?

Be creative with your questions and depending on the level of the students, be strict about pronunciation. If you are inspired, you can even offer some small prizes to the winners.