Amazon River Trivia
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54 free Amazon River trivia questions with answers — geography quiz, new questions added Sep 2026.
The Amazon is the biggest river on Earth by any measure that matters: it pours out more water than the next seven rivers combined, drains a basin the size of Australia, and pushes fresh water so far into the Atlantic that ships have drunk from the sea out of sight of land. This quiz starts with the basics (which ocean, which country, which city) and works up to the argument over its true source, the 2014 kayak survey that lengthened it by 80 km, the never-settled contest with the Nile, and the odd fact that no bridge crosses it anywhere. It also covers the geology (the river used to flow west into the Pacific until the Andes rose), the history (Pinzón's 'sweet sea', Orellana's women warriors, the rubber boom that built an opera house in the jungle, the Trans-Amazonian Highway) and the wildlife: pink botos, giant otters, anacondas, arapaima, candirú, electric eels and the bull sharks found 4,000 km upstream. It finishes with the tidal bore surfers ride, the underground Hamza 'river' and Martin Strel's 66-day swim. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's article on the Amazon River and related pages, and each question shows the sentence that supports it. Try our Brazil, rainforest and rivers quizzes next.
30 of 54 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01The Amazon is the largest river in the world by which measure?
Discharge volume
Discharge volume: it drains the world's largest river basin, gathering rainfall from both sides of the Equator.
Q 02Which river is usually ranked the world's longest, a title some researchers claim for the Amazon?
Nile
Nile: the ranking can flip because researchers disagree over which Peruvian headwater counts as the Amazon's start and which outlet marks its mouth.
Q 03Why do the Rio Negro and Solimões flow side by side for kilometres before mixing?
Different speeds and temperatures
Different speeds and temperatures: the cooler, faster Solimões runs beside the warmer, slower Negro, whose dark colour comes from decayed plant matter.
Q 04The Amazon basin's giant water lily is named after which monarch?
Queen Victoria
Queen Victoria: the lily's ribbed leaves inspired Joseph Paxton's lily house, which he scaled up into London's Crystal Palace.
Q 05In 2016, scientists announced finding what beneath the muddy waters off the Amazon's mouth?
A coral reef
A coral reef: it astonished scientists, since coral usually thrives in clear, sunlit water, and the area was already marked for oil drilling.
Q 06Which former US president nearly died exploring an Amazon tributary called the River of Doubt?
Theodore Roosevelt
Theodore Roosevelt: he took on the trip after losing the 1912 election, and fever and a gashed leg left his health permanently damaged.
Q 07In Werner Herzog's film Fitzcarraldo, what does a would-be rubber baron haul over a jungle hill?
A steamship
A steamship: Herzog had his crew haul a real one up a steep hillside in the Peruvian jungle, fighting mud and broken machinery.
Q 08Which animal of the Amazon's riverbanks is the world's largest rodent?
Capybara
Capybara: a strong swimmer with partly webbed toes, it escapes danger by slipping into the water and hiding.
Q 09Which snake of the Amazon's swamps and rivers is the heaviest in the world?
Green anaconda
Green anaconda: its eyes and nostrils sit on top of its head, so it can lie almost fully submerged while it waits for prey.
Q 10Which Spanish explorer, once captain of Columbus's Niña, reached the Amazon estuary in 1500?
Vicente Yáñez Pinzón
Vicente Yáñez Pinzón: he reached Brazil's coast before Cabral, yet the Portuguese navigator is usually credited as its discoverer.
Q 11The Amazon's name is said to recall female warriors from which culture's myths?
Greek
Greek: Orellana reported battles with women warriors, whom he likened to the Amazons of myth, though other theories trace the name to a native word.
Q 12Gonzalo Pizarro's 1541 expedition east of Quito, with Orellana as his lieutenant, sought which legendary place?
El Dorado
El Dorado: the name first meant not a city but a Muisca ruler, said to be coated in gold dust at a ceremony on a lake.
Q 13Which American industrialist founded a town on an Amazon tributary in the 1920s to grow rubber for tyres?
Henry Ford
Henry Ford: his rubber trees were planted close together, letting native pests and blight sweep through, and the plantation town failed.
Q 21What is the pororoca?
A tidal bore that surges up the river
A tidal bore that surges up the river: it peaks around spring tides, when the Sun and Moon pull together, sending a roaring wall of water upstream.
Q 22A natural channel called the Casiquiare links the Amazon basin with which other great river?
Orinoco
Orinoco: in 1744 a Jesuit priest met Portuguese slave traders on the Orinoco and travelled with them through the channel to the Rio Negro.
Q 23The Amazon's forests that the river floods every year are known by which name?
Várzea
Várzea: each year's flood renews the soil with nutrients, making these forests some of the most productive parts of the Amazon.
Q 14Which British explorer vanished in 1925 while searching the Amazon for a lost city he called Z?
Percy Fawcett
Percy Fawcett: many later expeditions set out to learn what had happened to him, but none managed to find out.
Q 15Which added material gives the Amazon's fertile, human-made 'terra preta' soil its dark colour?
Charcoal
Charcoal: it binds nutrients and keeps the soil fertile year after year, letting ancient Amazonians farm land that is normally poor.
Q 16In 1876 Henry Wickham shipped 70,000 Amazon rubber-tree seeds to which British botanic garden?
Kew Gardens
Kew Gardens: only about 2,700 sprouted, yet seedlings sent on to Ceylon and Singapore helped start Asia's rubber plantations.
Q 17The tambaqui, a large Amazon fish, has molar-like teeth mainly for crushing what?
Seeds and nuts
Seeds and nuts: some seeds from fallen fruit pass through its gut unharmed, so the fish carries trees' seeds far from where they fell.
Q 18How many bridges span the full width of the Amazon River?
None
None: few roads on either bank need linking, since the river runs mostly through sparsely populated rainforest, so ferries and boats do the job.
Q 19What stops the Amazon from building a large delta?
Waves and tides carry the sediment away
Waves and tides carry the sediment away: strong coastal currents sweep much of the silt toward the Guianas, where it builds mud flats along the shore.
Q 20Which Amazon fish, nicknamed the water monkey, leaps out of the river to snatch prey from overhanging branches?
Silver arowana
Silver arowana: the males carry the eggs and newly hatched young around in their mouths for weeks.
Q 24Which naturalist, who conceived natural selection independently of Darwin, spent four years collecting in the Amazon?
Alfred Russel Wallace
Alfred Russel Wallace: on the voyage home his ship caught fire, and most of the specimens and notes from his Amazon years were lost.
Q 25What was the Hamza River, announced in August 2011?
A large aquifer running beneath the Amazon
The underground flow parallels the surface river.
Q 26Which metal do informal gold miners in the Amazon use to capture gold particles?
Mercury
Mercury: it binds the gold into a lump, and the metal that escapes builds up in river fish eaten by villagers downstream.
Q 27Which Amazon fish can stun its prey with electric shocks of several hundred volts?
Electric eel
Electric eel: despite its name it is not a true eel, and because its eyesight is poor it uses weak electric pulses to find its way and locate prey.
Q 28How does the Amazon river dolphin's skin colour typically change as it grows up?
From grey to pink
From grey to pink: the pink is thought to come from scrapes and scar tissue, which is why males, which fight more, tend to be pinker.
Q 29Which Amazon animal is sometimes nicknamed the 'river wolf'?
Giant otter
Giant otter: prized for its dense, velvety fur, it was hunted so heavily that it is now listed as endangered.
Q 30What ability lets the arapaima, one of the world's largest freshwater fish, survive in oxygen-poor water?
It breathes air
It breathes air: it must surface every 10 to 20 minutes to gulp air, which makes it an easy target for fishermen with harpoons.