Closest number wins: 40 questions with answers

Everyone at the table knows the Eiffel Tower is tall. Nobody knows how tall. Ask for a number and you get "three hundred," "a thousand" and one confident "about a mile," and the argument that follows is the game.

These 40 closest-number-wins questions all have answers nobody can be sure of. Everyone guesses a number, the nearest guess takes the point, and whoever was furthest off gets to explain how they got there.

How to play closest number wins

One person reads the question. Everyone says a number, in turn or all together on a count of three. Then read the answer: the closest guess takes the point, and if two guesses are equally close, both score. For a year, the closest year wins. For a height or a distance, any unit is fine as long as you say which one: feet or meters, miles or kilometers.

The answers below give feet and miles first, with meters and kilometers beside them.

Round one: how tall, how high

1. How tall is the Eiffel Tower? 1,083 feet (330 m).
2. How tall is the Statue of Liberty, from the ground to the torch, pedestal included? 305 feet (93 m).
3. How tall is Burj Khalifa, the tallest skyscraper in Dubai? 2,717 feet (828 m). The sun sets a couple of minutes later on the Burj Khalifa's upper floors than at street level, so residents above the 80th floor break their Ramadan fast later than people on the ground.
4. How tall is the Great Pyramid of Giza today, the last ancient wonder still standing? 451 feet (138 m).
5. How tall is the Willis Tower, a skyscraper in Chicago? 1,450 feet (442 m).
6. How tall is One World Trade Center, the tallest skyscraper in the Western Hemisphere? 1,776 feet (541 m). Its height of 1,776 feet matches the year the Declaration of Independence was approved.
7. How high above sea level is Mount Everest? 29,032 feet (8,849 m).
8. How high above sea level is Mount Fuji, the highest mountain in Japan? 12,388 feet (3,776 m).
9. How high above sea level is Mount Rushmore, site of a presidential monument in South Dakota? 5,725 feet (1,745 m). The faces carved into this mountain took over fourteen years to complete and honor four different American presidents.
10. How high above sea level is Mauna Kea, a volcano in Hawaii? 13,800 feet (4,210 m).

Round two: rivers, lakes and the deep

11. How long is the Nile? 4,130 miles (6,650 km).
12. How long is the Amazon, the largest river by water volume? 4,000 miles (6,400 km). The Amazon carries more water than any other river on Earth and pumps so much fresh water into the ocean that it creates a giant freshwater plume far out into the Atlantic.
13. How long is the Mississippi River, a major river in the United States? 2,340 miles (3,770 km).
14. How long is the Yangtze River, the longest river in Asia? 3,910 miles (6,300 km).
15. How long is the Seine, the river that flows through Paris? 483 miles (777 km). The Seine flows right through the heart of Paris, past famous landmarks like the Eiffel Tower and Notre Dame.
16. How deep is Lake Baikal, the oldest lake on Earth, at its deepest point? 5,315 feet (1,620 m).
17. How deep is Lake Superior, the largest of the Great Lakes, at its deepest point? 1,330 feet (406 m).
18. How deep is the Challenger Deep, the deepest point of the ocean? 35,900 feet (10,935 m). The Challenger Deep sits at the bottom of the Mariana Trench, the deepest known point in all of Earth's oceans.
19. How wide is the English Channel at its narrowest point, the Strait of Dover? 21 miles (34 km).
20. How tall is Victoria Falls, a waterfall on the Zambezi River? 354 feet (108 m).

Round three: what year

21. In what year did Columbus first reach the Americas? 1492. Columbus never actually set foot on the mainland of what is now the United States.
22. Around what year did Gutenberg invent his movable-type printing press? 1440.
23. In what year was the Great Fire of London? 1666.
24. In what year was the Eiffel Tower completed? 1889. It was built as the star attraction of the 1889 World's Fair and was only meant to stand for 20 years; radio experiments on the tower helped save it from demolition.
25. In what year were the first modern Olympic Games held? 1896.
26. In what year did the Wright brothers first fly a powered aircraft? 1903.
27. In what year did the Titanic sink? 1912. The Titanic was said to be unsinkable, yet it sank on its very first voyage.
28. In what year did a pilot first break the sound barrier in level flight? 1947.
29. In what year did humans first walk on the Moon? 1969.
30. In what year did the Berlin Wall come down? 1989. Once the border opened, crowds chipped pieces off the Berlin Wall as souvenirs, but the official demolition by border troops did not begin until June 1990.

Round four: numbers you half know

31. How far away is the Moon on average? 239,000 miles (384,000 km).
32. What is the average diameter of the Earth? 7,918 miles (12,742 km).
33. How many bones are in the adult human body? 206. Babies are actually born with about three hundred bones, but many of them fuse together as they grow into adults.
34. How many keys does a standard piano have? 88.
35. How many small squares make up a standard chessboard? 64.
36. How tall is Hyperion, the tallest known living tree? 381 feet (116 m). Hyperion is a coast redwood in California, and coast redwoods are the tallest living trees on the planet.
37. What temperature was measured in Death Valley in 1913, the hottest ever officially recorded on Earth? 134°F (56.7°C).
38. How long is an official marathon? 26.2 miles (42.195 km).
39. To what age did Jeanne Calment, the longest-lived person on record, live? 122. Jeanne Calment holds the longest confirmed human lifespan ever documented, verified by extensive birth and life records.
40. Roughly how many people were aboard the Titanic on its final voyage? 2,224.

Where these numbers come from

The questions come from Quizy's Closest Guess packs. About half the heights, lengths and depths are values from Wikidata, which is shared under CC0; the rest, and the years and records, were compiled from public reference works. Where a newer official figure exists, the page uses it: Mount Everest is the height China and Nepal announced together in 2020. Sources measure rivers differently, so treat a river's length as the answer for this game rather than the last word.

Every answer and story line was checked again on 25 October 2026 and once more on 8 November, and the lines corrected in those checks rest on these pages:

• Eiffel Tower, official site: 300 330 meters story towers height, key figures
• The National
• Britannica: Pyramids of Giza, One World Trade Center, Mount Everest, Mount Fuji, Mount Rushmore National Memorial, Amazon River, Lake Baikal
• Berlin Wall Foundation
• NASA Earth fact sheet
• Guinness World Records
• Olympics.com

Questions people ask

How do you play closest number wins? Everyone guesses a number for the same question. The guess nearest the real answer takes the point, and a tie scores for both.

What makes a good closest-guess question? A number everyone can guess and almost nobody knows exactly: how tall, how deep, how far, what year.

Do you need to know the answer to play? No. That is the point of the game: a sensible guess can beat a confident wrong answer, so everyone has a chance on every question.

A host who works out who was closest

Quizy has a game for this, Closest Guess, one of the party games on its Partymix tile, which come with Basic and Premium. The host asks each player in turn, locks every guess in without saying how close it is, then reveals the answer and names who was closest. Say your number in feet or meters; if you leave the unit off, the host asks which you meant. .

Tonight

Ask the Eiffel Tower question at dinner, and write nothing down.