Apricots
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40 free Apricots trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Apricots look modest next to showier summer fruit, but few orchard crops carry as many stories. The small golden fruit has travelled with traders and armies, picked up superstitions along the way, and lent its name to everything from a colour to a computer. This quiz turns the best fun facts about apricots into questions: where the fruit first grew and how it got its name, how the trees are raised and the harvest dried, what is hidden inside the stone, and which famous cakes, drinks and sweets depend on it. A few questions follow the apricot into folklore, film and literature. It suits food lovers, gardeners, students and anyone who enjoys a surprising fact with their fruit bowl. Every answer comes with a short explanation, so you can guess first and learn the story afterwards.
30 of 40 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which US military service considers apricots such bad luck that its members avoid eating them near tanks?
Marine Corps
The Marine Corps superstition runs so deep that many crews will not even say the fruit's name, calling them cots or A-fruit instead. It has been documented since at least the Vietnam War.
Q 02Apricot kernels contain amygdalin, a compound that can release which deadly poison when the seeds are eaten?
Cyanide
Cyanide is released as the body breaks amygdalin down, and European food-safety officials warn that eating just three small bitter kernels can exceed the safe limit.
Q 03Which sweet Italian liqueur often gets its nutty flavour from apricot kernels?
Amaretto
Amaretto brands such as Disaronno take their nutty flavour from apricot kernel oil and contain no almonds at all. Legend credits a Saronno innkeeper who steeped the kernels in brandy in 1525.
Q 04Which ancient Chinese philosopher is said to have taught his students in a forum ringed by apricot trees?
Confucius
Confucius and his apricot-shaded classroom, described by the writer Zhuangzi, left such a mark that the phrase apricot altar still means the world of education in written Chinese.
Q 05Los Altos, once a farm town known for its apricot orchards, now sits on the edge of which technology hub?
Silicon Valley
Silicon Valley was built over what had been the world's largest fruit-growing and packing district until the 1960s. Los Altos, where the first Apple computers were assembled in a garage, still keeps an orchard at its civic centre.
Q 06Apricot is the name of a soft orange coat colour in which dog breed, originally used to retrieve wildfowl from water?
Poodle
Poodle coats come in apricot as well as black, white, silver and red, a dainty palette for a breed that most likely began as a water dog in Germany.
Q 07Which conqueror, whose empire reached India, is traditionally credited with introducing the apricot to Greece?
Alexander the Great
Alexander the Great is given the credit for bringing the fruit west, and within a few centuries orchards were established across Greece and Italy.
Q 08In Egyptian Arabic, a promise to do something tomorrow, when the apricots are in season, is a wry way of saying what?
It will never happen
It will never happen is the message, because Egypt's apricot season is so short and unreliable that anything promised for it may not arrive. The retort works much like the English one about flying pigs.
Q 09The apricot is the national fruit of which mountainous country, where most of the crop grows on the Ararat plain?
Armenia
Armenia has grown the fruit for so long that botanists once assumed it began there, and around 50 varieties are still cultivated in the country.
Q 10Which US state grows almost all of the country's commercial apricot crop, far ahead of Washington and Utah?
California
California dominates the harvest, and its town of Patterson has styled itself the Apricot Capital of the World since 1971, with a fiesta held every June.
Q 11Which famous Viennese chocolate cake hides a layer of apricot jam beneath its glossy dark icing?
Sachertorte
Sachertorte takes its name from Franz Sacher, the Austrian confectioner who created it, and in one story he was a teenage apprentice baking for Prince Metternich.
Q 12Malatya, a city nicknamed the Land of Apricots and famed for its sun-dried fruit, is in which country?
Turkey
Turkey's dried apricots come almost entirely from one region: Malatya Province supplies about 95% of the national crop.
Q 13The word apricot probably comes from a Latin term for early-ripening fruit, a root shared with which English adjective?
Precocious
Precocious first described fruit that ripened ahead of time, and Romans seem to have regarded the apricot as a peach that was ready sooner than the rest.
Q 21Barack, often called the best known of all apricot brandies, is a traditional fruit spirit of which country?
Hungary
Hungary makes barack as a kind of pálinka, and the word covers two fruits: the apricot is the yellow barack and the peach the autumn one.
Q 22Qamar al-Din, a thick drink made from sheets of apricot paste and popular during Ramadan, comes from which country?
Syria
Syria is so tied to the fruit that in Argentina and Chile the apricot is called damasco, a name that seems to point to Damascus. The drink is served cold and thick after a day of fasting.
Q 23In Chinese, the poetic title Expert of the Apricot Grove is a traditional compliment for members of which profession?
Doctors
Q 14Apricot trees belong to which plant family, shared with apples, pears, strawberries and almonds?
Rose
Rose relatives fill the fruit bowl, since the family ranks among the six most economically important groups of crop plants and also supplies cherries, peaches and raspberries.
Q 15Drying apricots concentrates their nutrients, leaving the fruit especially rich in which mineral?
Potassium
Potassium passes a fifth of the daily value in 100 grams of dried apricots, well ahead of the banana, whose reputation for the mineral outruns its modest 12%.
Q 16Ground apricot shells are used in face scrubs as a natural replacement for which tiny plastic particles?
Microbeads
Microbeads have been banned from rinse-off cosmetics in countries including Canada, France and New Zealand, pushing scrub makers towards crushed fruit stones and cocoa husks.
Q 17Austria's Marillenknödel, made with whole apricots, are which kind of dish?
Dumplings
Dumplings of this kind were so loved by Emperor Ferdinand I that he is remembered for demanding them from his cook even when apricots were out of season.
Q 18Apricot jam is a classic filling for hamantaschen, the three-cornered pastries baked for which Jewish festival?
Purim
Purim bakers shape the pastries after Haman, the villain of the Book of Esther, and apricot sits beside poppy seed among the best-loved traditional fillings.
Q 19Botanists class the apricot, like the cherry, olive and mango, as which type of fruit?
Drupe
Drupe is the botanist's word for a stone fruit, and the group is broader than it sounds, taking in coffee, pistachios and cashews as well as peaches.
Q 20Which discredited cancer remedy made from apricot kernels has been sold under the misnomer vitamin B17?
Laetrile
Laetrile is a chemical derivative of the kernels' amygdalin and not a vitamin at all, and studies have found it useless against cancer while carrying a real risk of poisoning.
Doctors earned the title through Dong Feng, a healer of the Three Kingdoms era who took no fees and asked each cured patient to plant apricot trees, until a whole grove surrounded him.
Q 24Most American apricot orchards descend from seedlings carried to the West Coast by which group of newcomers?
Spanish missionaries
Spanish missionaries planted the trees that founded the western industry, although settlers had already carried apricots to the colonies of the New World in the 17th century.
Q 25Apricot Computers, a fruit-named maker of business PCs that peaked in the 1980s, was based in which country?
Britain
Britain's Apricot, with its research centre in Birmingham, was one of the first computer makers to use 3.5-inch disks, at a time when larger 5.25-inch floppies were the norm.
Q 26Eva Rivas sang Apricot Stone, with an apricot tree on stage, as her country's 2010 entry in which competition?
Eurovision Song Contest
Eurovision Song Contest viewers saw the tree appear after a dancer watered an apricot stone on stage, and the entry went on to finish seventh in the final.
Q 27Which sour, salty Japanese pickle, often eaten with rice, is made from a fruit that botanists class as an apricot?
Umeboshi
Umeboshi are brined ume, a fruit whose tree sits in the apricot section of its genus despite the English name it usually goes by. They are often tucked inside rice balls.
Q 28Which preservative keeps dried apricots bright orange, while untreated fruit turns dark brown as it dries?
Sulphur dioxide
Sulphur dioxide blocks the browning reactions that would otherwise darken the fruit, so the paler a dried apricot looks, the more of the gas it generally holds.
Q 29A cheaper paste made from ground apricot kernels and sugar is used by confectioners in place of which sweet?
Marzipan
Marzipan made the costly way uses almonds, so makers add a pinch of starch to persipan, letting a simple iodine test tell the two apart. It often turns up inside German stollen.
Q 30Spring frosts are the main enemy of apricot growers because the trees do what unusually early in the year?
Blossom
Blossom opens before the leaves, in early March in western Europe, so a single cold night can wipe out a whole year's crop.