How well do you know these famous museums?

By: John Miller
Estimated Completion Time
3 min
How well do you know these famous museums?
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About This Quiz

Every year, millions of people swarm to the best museums, hoping to see both natural wonders and the human imagination at its finest. How much do you know about the world's top museums?
MoMA is a crazy popular museum in New York. What does MOMA stand for, anyway?
it’s a secret
Museum of Modern Art
Museum of Mammaries and Anuses
Correct Answer
Wrong Answer

MoMA is an iconic art museum in New York. It's technically called the Museum of Modern Art, but everyone just refers to it as MoMA.

Which of the following is the most-visited U.S. museum?
Uffizi Gallery
National Museum of Natural History
National Mustard Museum
Correct Answer
Wrong Answer

The National Museum of Natural History, which is administered by the Smithsonian Institution, is America's most-visited museum. It's also one of the most popular museums in the world.

The National Palace Museum is located in Taiwan. There, visitors see what sorts of collections?
stamps
ancient art
cheaply made clothing
Correct Answer
Wrong Answer

Taiwan's National Palace Museum features scads of ancient Chinese art. Almost all of the pieces were initially collected by Chinese emperors.

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More than 6 million people visit the National Gallery every year. In which country will you find this famous gallery?
Guatemala
England
Liberia
Correct Answer
Wrong Answer

The National Gallery is located in London, England. It features more than 2,300 paintings, including some of the most famous paintings in history.

What sort of exhibits would you find at the National Museum of Natural History?
cultural artifacts and dead stuff
mostly paintings of George Washington
mostly oil paintings
Correct Answer
Wrong Answer

Do you see dead people? You will at the National Museum of Natural History. You'll see human remains, plant remains, animal remains and more dead stuff than you can shake a fossilized femur at.

Where would you find a world-famous painting called the "Mona Lisa"?
Palace Museum
the Louvre
Trump Tower
Correct Answer
Wrong Answer

The "Mona Lisa" is probably the most famous piece of art in the history of civilization. It's been hanging at the Louvre in Paris since the 1790s, except for the time it was stolen in 1911 and when it was hidden from the Nazis during WWII.

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Beijing's Palace Museum has many collections that include ______.
very large hats
ceramics
duck sauce
Correct Answer
Wrong Answer

The Palace Museum is renowned for its exquisite ceramics collections, and many porcelain pieces, too. Combined with all other artwork, the museum has more than 1 million pieces of priceless art and artifacts.

The Sistine Chapel is part of what museum complex?
the Vatican Museums
MoMA
the Guggenheim
Correct Answer
Wrong Answer

The Vatican Museums include the Sistine Chapel, which has the most famous ceiling frescoes in the world, painted by Michelangelo in the early 1500s.

During World War II, just before the Nazis captured Paris, what did the Louvre's curators do with their beloved exhibits?
painted them with anti-Nazi slogans
transported them out of the city
set them on fire
Correct Answer
Wrong Answer

Curators hastily packed up what they could and shipped the exhibits to safe houses in the French countryside. The Nazis "reopened" the Louvre during the occupation… but it was mostly empty.

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Which of the following is NOT one of the top ten most visited museums in the world?
British Museum
Vatican Museums
International UFO Museum
Correct Answer
Wrong Answer

Sorry, alien lovers, the International UFO Museum is not in the top ten. This other-worldly museum is located in Roswell, New Mexico, near Area 51.

The Uffizi Gallery in Florence has some of the most important works of art from which period?
Dark Ages
American Revolution
Italian Renaissance
Correct Answer
Wrong Answer

The Uffizi Gallery has many priceless works from the Italian Renaissance. If you like Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo, this is a great place to visit.

In 1958, what sort of disaster struck MoMA?
an earthquake
a fire
abstract art
Correct Answer
Wrong Answer

In 1958, maintenance workers accidentally started a fire at the famed museum. The flames ruined two Monet water lilies paintings.

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In what country would you find the Van Gogh Museum?
Iceland
Finland
the Netherlands
Correct Answer
Wrong Answer

The Netherlands is home to Amsterdam's Van Gogh museum. Van Gogh was 27 before he decided to become an artist, then he proceeded to change the world of art forever.

Which museum features an iconic glass pyramid in its courtyard?
Van Gogh Museum
The Louvre
The Bunny Museum
Correct Answer
Wrong Answer

The Louvre features a massive glass pyramid that was completed in 1988. The huge glass pyramid has become one of the museum's most recognizable architectural features.

Where would you find the National Museum of Korea?
Hamhung, North Korea
Seoul, South Korea
Tokyo
Correct Answer
Wrong Answer

The National Museum of Korea is located in Seoul, South Korea. It was established in 1945 after the country gained its independence…and then many of the pieces almost had to be immediately moved again, due to the outbreak of the Korean War.

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The Hermitage Museum is one of the biggest and oldest museums in the world. Where would you visit it?
Russia
Uganda
Australian Outback
Correct Answer
Wrong Answer

The Hermitage Museum is located in Saint Petersburg, Russia. Founded by Elizabeth of Russia and Catherine the Great in the 1750s and 1760s, it sees more than 3.5 million visitors per year.

Architect Frank Lloyd Wright designed which iconic New York museum?
the Guggenheim
Computer & Robotics Museum
The World Museum of Scientology
Correct Answer
Wrong Answer

Frank Lloyd designed the Guggenheim in New York in the U.S.; Frank Gehry designed the Guggenheim Bilbao in Bilbao, Spain.

Where would you visit the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía?
Saudi Arabia
Spain
U.S.
Correct Answer
Wrong Answer

The Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, or simply Reina Sofía, is in Madrid, Spain. It was officially inaugurated in 1992. The museum is the home of Picasso's "Guernica" and "Woman in Blue."

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The National Gallery of Art, in Washington, D.C., has a well-known garden that features what?
leprechauns
sculptures
tomatoes
Correct Answer
Wrong Answer

D.C.'s National Gallery of Art has a famous Sculpture Garden. The garden's 6 acres were opened in 1999 and often feature gigantic pieces that stretch toward the sky.

What is the largest museum on Earth?
The Louvre
Metropolitan Museum of Art
Graceland
Correct Answer
Wrong Answer

France's Louvre is the biggest museum on the planet. It has an exhibition area that sprawls more than 780,000 square feet, and it contains more than 35,000 works of art.

Before it became a museum, what was the Louvre?
an aircraft hangar
a fort
a Kmart
Correct Answer
Wrong Answer

The Louvre was originally a fortress that dates all the way back to the beginning of the 13th century. It's been used as a palace and is now one of the world's most famous museums.

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Which famous person donated much of the money that helped to establish the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.?
Andrew Mellon
Steve Jobs
Bill Gates
Correct Answer
Wrong Answer

The National Gallery of Art was established in 1937, thanks in large part to a filthy-rich guy named Andrew Mellon, a businessman. He also served as Secretary of the Treasury... just before the U.S. nosedived into the Great Depression.

The best museums are huge tourist draws. In which city would you find the most visited museum in the world?
Reykjavík
Beijing
Roswell
Correct Answer
Wrong Answer

Beijing boasts the most-visited museum in the world. It's home to the Palace Museum, which hosts around 16 million visitors per year. It's located in Beijing's Forbidden City.

What sort of exhibits would you find at the British Museum?
sculpture
mostly Beatles posters
anything you can imagine
Correct Answer
Wrong Answer

The British Museum, which opened its doors in the 1750s, has just about anything you can imagine, from primitive artifacts to modern art. It has approximately 8 million objects in its collection.

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At which museum would you find a monumental staircase built in the 2ND CENTURY?
Guggenheim Museum
Pergamon Museum
Van Gogh Museum
Correct Answer
Wrong Answer

The Pergamon Museum in Berlin is home to the Pergamon Altar, a simply massive stairway made from enormous slabs of stone (although it has been under renovation since 2014). You'll also see the Ishtar Gate of Babylon and the Market Gate of Miletus, both rebuilt using remnants excavated in the Middle East.

Which museum features an enormous tessellated glass roof over an area called the Great Court?
British Museum
Hermitage Museum
Idaho Potato Museum
Correct Answer
Wrong Answer

The British Museum contains the Queen Elizabeth II Great Court, which is usually just called the Great Court. The visually striking roof sits over the biggest covered square in all of Europe.

The National Museum of Natural History has a mind-boggling number of animal and plant specimens. About how many specimens does it have?
about 400,000
about 1.2 million
about 126 million
Correct Answer
Wrong Answer

The curators of the National Museum of Natural History hoard plant and animal remains like obsessive serial killers. The museum boasts more than 126 million specimens in its enormous collection.

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Which colorful Paris museum has much of its infrastructure on the outside?
Centre Georges Pompidou
Musee de Paris
Louvre
Correct Answer
Wrong Answer

The Pompidou in Paris has many systems visible and color-coded. Yellow is for electric, green is for plumbing, blue is for air conditioning, and red is for elevators.

Tate Modern is roughly London's version of _____.
Acropolis Museum
MoMA
the Louvre
Correct Answer
Wrong Answer

Tate Modern is a modern art gallery, much like the MoMA in New York City. The museum is housed in a big old power station, the Bankside Power Station, which closed in the early '80s.

Where would you find the oldest museum in the world?
Italy
United States
Greenland
Correct Answer
Wrong Answer

The Capitoline Museums, in Rome, Italy, is considered the oldest museum in the world. In spite of the name it's considered a single museum, and it's been open to the public since the 1470s.

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