60 free Amazon Rainforest trivia questions with answers — geography quiz, new questions added Aug 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 60 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01How many countries share the Amazon basin?
Nine
Brazil holds by far the largest share, followed by Peru and Colombia.
Q 02Roughly what share of the Amazon rainforest lies inside Brazil?
About 60%
Peru has about 13% and Colombia about 10%; six other countries share the rest.
Q 03Roughly how many individual trees are estimated to grow in the Amazon rainforest?
390 billion
They belong to about 16,000 different species.
Q 04What share of all the world's known species is said to live in the Amazon rainforest?
One in ten
That includes about 2.5 million insect species and some 2,000 birds and mammals.
Q 05How much of the world's remaining rainforest does the Amazon represent?
Over half
It is the largest and most biodiverse tract of tropical rainforest on Earth.
Q 06Francisco de Orellana coined the name 'Amazon' after fighting tribes whose women did what?
Fought alongside the men
He borrowed the name from the warrior women of Greek myth described by Herodotus.
Q 07In which year did Orellana become the first European to travel the length of the Amazon River?
1542
His reports of a populous civilisation along the river were long dismissed as exaggeration but now look accurate.
Q 08Excavations at Caverna da Pedra Pintada show humans settled the Amazon at least how long ago?
11,200 years
By AD 1250 there were substantial settlements around the forest's edge.
Q 09Which British explorer vanished in the 1920s searching the Amazon for a lost civilisation he called the City of Z?
Percy Fawcett
His expeditions were inconclusive, but geoglyphs found since the 1970s support the idea of large pre-Columbian societies.
Q 10What gives terra preta, the dark fertile earth found across the Amazon, its black colour?
Charcoal added by ancient people
It is now accepted as a product of indigenous soil management, suggesting much of the forest was shaped by people.
Q 11More than half the dust that fertilises the Amazon blows in from a single depression in which desert?
The Sahara
The Bodélé depression in Chad supplies phosphorus that replaces what rain washes out of the soil each year.
Q 12Roughly how long has the Amazon rainforest existed?
At least 55 million years
It probably formed in the Eocene, once the Atlantic was wide enough to deliver a warm, moist climate.
Q 13What proportion of the Amazon rainforest had been deforested by 2022?
Around 20%
Scientists warn that at 20-25% the forest could tip into degraded savanna.
Q 21Which country has been the largest donor to Brazil's Amazon Fund, set up in 2008 to fight deforestation?
Norway
Germany and the oil company Petrobras were the next biggest contributors up to 2018.
Q 22Chico Mendes, the Amazon activist murdered in 1988, worked in what trade?
Rubber tapper
His union pioneered the 'empate', a human blockade of rubber reserves threatened with clearing.
Q 23In which Brazilian state was Chico Mendes born and killed?
Acre
The rancher Darly Alves da Silva, who had bought part of a rubber reserve near Xapuri, was behind the killing.
Q 14What is the primary cause of deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon, responsible for about 80% of it?
Cattle ranching
Soy is a distant second, and a 2006 moratorium banned buying soy from newly cleared land.
Q 15Which road, opened in 1972, is blamed for opening the interior of the Amazon to large-scale clearing?
The Trans-Amazonian Highway
Officially BR-230, it runs about 4,000 km and long stretches are still unpaved.
Q 16Which two Brazilian states have suffered the highest levels of Amazon deforestation?
Mato Grosso and Pará
In 2004, a peak year, over 20% of the forests in Mato Grosso were converted to cropland.
Q 17What did the 2006 Soy Moratorium ban?
Buying soy from newly deforested land
Brazil is now the world's largest soybean producer, and the moratorium is weakening.
Q 18Deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon fell by about how much in the first ten months of 2023 under Lula?
50%
The drop compared with the same period in 2022 under his predecessor.
Q 19Smoke from the 2019 Amazon fires darkened the daytime sky over which city thousands of km away?
São Paulo
NASA confirmed the Brazilian space agency INPE's satellite counts, drawing global attention.
Q 20What did President Bolsonaro do after INPE reported an 88% rise in fires in July 2019?
Fired the agency's director
He called the numbers 'fake'; after G7 pressure he sent 44,000 troops to fight the fires.
Q 24What was the 'empate' used by Chico Mendes and his fellow rubber tappers?
A human blockade to stop forest clearing
Their discussions also produced the concept of 'extractive reserves'.
Q 25The first Amazon rubber boom ran roughly from 1879 until which year?
1912
A brief second boom came during World War II, from 1942 to 1945.
Q 26Who smuggled some 70,000 rubber tree seeds from Brazil to Kew Gardens in 1875?
Henry Wickham
Only about 4% germinated, but seedlings shipped to Ceylon and Singapore founded Asia's plantations.
Q 27Which Irish diplomat documented the enslavement and torture of natives in Peru's Putumayo region in 1910-11?
Roger Casement
He had earlier exposed similar atrocities in the Congo.
Q 28Manaus's Teatro Amazonas opera house, built with rubber money, opened in which year?
1896
It was built with bricks from Europe, French glass and Italian marble, and stood mostly closed for much of the 20th century.
Q 29Which American industrialist founded the rubber plantation town of Fordlândia in 1928?
Henry Ford
The town was meant to house 10,000 people; the project failed and was abandoned in 1934.
Q 30Where did Ford move his rubber project after abandoning Fordlândia in 1934?
Belterra
It lay 40 km south of Santarém, where conditions for rubber were better; synthetic rubber then killed demand by 1945.