10-Question Literature Quiz

Who wrote 'Pride and Prejudice'? If someone answers Jane Austen without blinking, the opener won't slow them down. The nine questions that follow are harder to sweep, reaching from Hermione Granger's book series to the opening line of A Tale of Two Cities and the author of The Odyssey. This ready-made quiz tests classic and modern literature in about 4 to 6 minutes, pitched at a medium difficulty that rewards real readers without shutting out casual ones.

From Austen to Orwell in ten questions

The quiz mixes three formats. Most items are single choice, like naming who wrote To Kill a Mockingbird from a list that includes Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and Steinbeck. Two are true or false statements, including one on whether Sir Arthur Conan Doyle created Sherlock Holmes. Two more are select-all questions; the trickiest asks which authors are known for dystopian fiction and expects takers to pick Orwell, Huxley, and Bradbury while leaving Austen and Twain unchecked.

Question order is randomized on every attempt, and takers can't skip ahead or step back to revise an answer once it's committed. A progress indicator shows how far along they are, which keeps a ten-item quiz from feeling open ended.

Scoring: 100 points, pass at 60

Every question carries 10 points, for a total of 100, and the pass mark sits at 60. That means a taker can miss four questions and still clear the bar, a fair setting for a quiz that spans Homer to Harry Potter. Feedback appears immediately after each answer, paired with a short explanation, so a wrong guess on the dystopian authors question teaches something on the spot: Orwell wrote 1984, Huxley wrote Brave New World, Bradbury wrote Fahrenheit 451.

There's no timer, and retakes are switched on, so people who fall short at 50 can come back and try again. Because the order shuffles each time, a second attempt doesn't play out as a memorized sequence.

Who actually runs a book quiz like this

English teachers use it as a low-stakes warm-up before a unit on the classics, since the built-in explanations do some quiet teaching on their own. Book clubs run it as an icebreaker at the start of a meeting, usually to friendly arguments over the dystopian question. Libraries and bookstores post it during reading challenges or literary anniversaries to give followers something to compete over, and trivia hosts lift rounds from it wholesale.

Reshelve the questions your way

Everything in the template is editable: swap questions, rewrite answer options, change point values, or raise the pass mark to 80 if your book club takes bragging rights seriously. You can restyle it with your own logo and palette, and add a lead capture step if you want to know who's playing.

The template runs on Uplup's free plan. Publish it as a direct link, print a QR code for an in-person event, post it straight to social, embed it on your site, or drop the shortcode from the Uplup WordPress plugin into a blog post.

Results land in a dashboard that shows every response, question-level accuracy that reveals which item trips people up (it's usually the Dickens opening line), and a CSV export. Webhooks and a Zapier connection can push completions into whatever tools you already use.