Amazon Rainforest Trivia
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55 free Amazon Rainforest trivia questions with answers — geography quiz, new questions added Sep 2026.
This Amazon rainforest trivia quiz covers the largest tropical forest on Earth: how big it is, how old it is, how many trees and species it holds, and the odd fact that its soil is fertilised by dust from the Sahara. It looks at the people who have lived there for over 11,000 years (terra preta, the geoglyphs, Percy Fawcett's City of Z, the Yanomami and the uncontacted groups) and the outsiders who came for gold and rubber: Orellana, the rubber barons of Manaus, Henry Wickham's smuggled seeds, Roger Casement, and Henry Ford's doomed Fordlândia. The second half covers what the forest is up against and what lives in it: cattle and soy, the Trans-Amazonian Highway, Belo Monte, the 2019 fires and the Amazon Fund, Chico Mendes and the empate, plus poison dart frogs, harpy eagles, Brazil nuts, giant water lilies, pink dolphins and açaí. Around a third of the questions are school-level; the rest will stretch geography teachers and pub quiz veterans. Our Amazon River quiz covers the river itself. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's articles on the Amazon rainforest, its deforestation, its peoples and its wildlife, and each explanation adds one more detail.
30 of 55 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which European country governs part of the Amazon rainforest?
France
France governs French Guiana as an overseas department, so a corner of Amazonia sits inside the European Union and uses the euro.
Q 02Despite its name, the Amazon's electric eel belongs to which group of fish?
Knifefishes
Knifefishes include the electric eel, and its shocks so intrigued early scientists that they helped inspire Alessandro Volta's first battery in 1800.
Q 03Roughly how many individual trees are estimated to grow in the Amazon rainforest?
390 billion
390 billion trees grow in Amazonia, a 2013 survey estimated, yet just 227 of its roughly 16,000 tree species make up half of them.
Q 04Which giant Amazon fish must come to the surface to breathe air?
Arapaima
Arapaima breathe air through a lung-like swim bladder, which lets these giants, up to 3 metres long, live in oxygen-poor backwaters.
Q 05After the Amazon, which region holds the world's second-largest tropical rainforest?
The Congo Basin
The Congo Basin's forest elephants eat and trample small trees, leaving room for fewer, bigger ones, which helps its rainforest store more carbon.
Q 06The Amazon River is said to be named after a battle in which local women did what?
Fought alongside the men
Spanish explorers reported women who fought alongside the men, recalling the warrior Amazons of Greek myth, though some say the fighters were long-haired men.
Q 07Sent to find food in 1541, which Spaniard drifted down the Amazon?
Francisco de Orellana
Francisco de Orellana could not row back against the current to Gonzalo Pizarro's expedition, so his party drifted on and reached the river's mouth in August 1542.
Q 08Which US president nearly died exploring the Amazon's uncharted River of Doubt after leaving office?
Theodore Roosevelt
Theodore Roosevelt took on the River of Doubt after losing the 1912 election, and an infected gash in his leg brought him close to death.
Q 09Which British explorer vanished in the 1920s searching the Amazon for a lost civilisation he called the City of Z?
Percy Fawcett
Percy Fawcett vanished in 1925 with his son Jack, and Arthur Conan Doyle is said to have drawn on his Amazon exploits for The Lost World.
Q 10What gives terra preta, the dark fertile earth found across the Amazon, its black colour?
Charcoal added by ancient people
Terra preta owes its black colour to charcoal added by ancient people, along with pottery shards and organic waste; it is now accepted as a product of indigenous soil management.
Q 11Which Amazon predator lives in family groups and was heavily hunted for its velvety pelt?
Giant otter
Giant otter families are active by day and show little fear of people, which made them easy targets for pelt hunters and left the species endangered.
Q 12Why do Amazon leafcutter ants carry leaves to their nests?
To grow fungus
To grow fungus: the ants feed the cut leaves to a fungus garden, and the fungus, not the leaves, feeds the colony's larvae.
Q 13What is the leading cause of deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon?
Cattle ranching
Cattle ranching drives most clearing, and soy is often planted later on the old pastures, which can push ranchers deeper into the forest.
Q 21Chico Mendes, the Amazon activist murdered in 1988, worked in what trade?
Rubber tapper
Chico Mendes was a rubber tapper who led his fellow tappers' union in defending the forest their trade depended on.
Q 22In which Brazilian state was Chico Mendes born and killed?
Acre
Acre is where Chico Mendes was born and died: after warning for weeks that he would be killed, he was shot at his Xapuri home in December 1988.
Q 23What was the 'empate' tactic used by Chico Mendes and his followers?
A human blockade to stop forest clearing
An empate was a human blockade to stop forest clearing: whole families of rubber tappers stood in front of the chainsaw crews.
Q 14Why did Brazil build the Trans-Amazonian Highway in the early 1970s?
To settle poor farmers
To settle poor farmers: the military government gave settler families plots along the road, and their clearings pushed deforestation inland.
Q 15Which Amazon state was Brazil's top grain producer in the late 2010s?
Mato Grosso
Mato Grosso's farms grew more grain than any other state's, and critics say that expanding agriculture keeps encroaching on the rainforest.
Q 16What did the 2006 Soy Moratorium ban?
Buying soy from newly deforested land
Under the 2006 Soy Moratorium, commodity traders agreed to stop buying soy from newly deforested land, a pledge prompted by a Greenpeace campaign.
Q 17Brazilian Amazon deforestation fell by roughly half in 2023, the first year of which president's term?
Lula da Silva
Lula da Silva took office in January 2023, and Amazon deforestation in Brazil fell by roughly half that year, a drop largely credited to his environmental policies.
Q 18Smoke from the 2019 Amazon fires darkened the daytime sky over which city thousands of km away?
São Paulo
São Paulo's sky went dark in the afternoon, and the scare turned the distant Amazon fires, little reported until then, into world news.
Q 19What did President Bolsonaro do after INPE reported deforestation up 88% in June 2019?
Fired the agency's director
Fired the agency's director: Bolsonaro dismissed physicist Ricardo Galvão in August 2019 after calling INPE's deforestation figures lies.
Q 20By 2020, which country had provided most of the money in Brazil's Amazon Fund, set up in 2008?
Norway
Norway gave about 90 percent of the Amazon Fund's money by 2020, paid out only after Brazil proved its deforestation was falling.
Q 24Whose wartime conquests set off a brief second Amazon rubber boom?
Japan
Japan overran Asia's rubber plantations in early 1942, and the Allies' need for military rubber briefly put wild Amazon rubber back in demand.
Q 25Who smuggled some 70,000 rubber tree seeds from Brazil to Kew Gardens in 1876?
Henry Wickham
Henry Wickham's seeds mostly died at Kew, yet the few thousand that sprouted grew into British colonial plantations that ended Brazil's rubber monopoly.
Q 26Which Irish diplomat documented the enslavement and torture of indigenous people in Peru's Putumayo rubber region?
Roger Casement
Roger Casement, a British consul who had already exposed atrocities in the Congo, reported the Putumayo rubber camps' abuses to the Foreign Office.
Q 27Which animal, the world's largest rodent, grazes along Amazon rivers and wetlands?
Capybara
The capybara, the world's largest rodent, is a semi-aquatic grazer that lives in groups along rivers and wetlands across the Amazon basin, escaping jaguars by diving.
Q 28Workers at Ford's Amazon town Fordlândia rioted in 1930 over what?
Cafeteria meals
Cafeteria meals set it off: workers fed up with Ford's imposed diet rioted when managers switched to self-service lines, wrecking the town and sending the managers fleeing.
Q 29What is the fungal disease, endemic to the Amazon, that makes rubber plantations there so hard to run?
Leaf blight
South American leaf blight epidemics wrecked Amazon rubber plantations in the early 20th century, most famously Henry Ford's Fordlândia.
Q 30The Yanomami live in the forest on the border between Brazil and which country?
Venezuela
Venezuela and Brazil share the Yanomami's forest, and in 1992, after a gold rush overran it, Brazil made its side a reserve twice the size of Switzerland.