In this paper we have proposed some ratio-type estimators of finite population variance using known values of parameters related to an auxiliary variable such as quartiles with their properties in simple random sampling. The suggested estimators have been compared with the usual unbiased and ratio estimators and the estimators due to [2], [12, 13, 14] and [3]. An empirical study is also carried out to judge the merits of the proposed estimator over other existing estimators of population variance using natural data set. 2000 AMS Classification: 62D05