Autumn
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208 free Autumn trivia questions with answers — nature quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
40 free Autumn trivia questions with answers. Autumn is the season of pumpkin patches, changing leaves, and a calendar packed with holidays, and this quiz covers all of it. You'll get questions on why leaves turn red and yellow, where the words 'fall' and 'autumn' came from, the history of Oktoberfest, candy corn, and the Pumpkin Spice Latte, plus the traditions of Halloween, Bonfire Night, Diwali, and Thanksgiving in both the US and Canada. It's written for anyone hosting a fall party, a classroom, or a family game night: about a third of the questions are easy enough for kids, and the rest climb to genuinely tricky facts about Vivaldi, Keats, and woolly bear caterpillars. Every answer has been checked against a primary source such as Wikipedia, a museum, or an official festival page, and each explanation adds one detail you probably didn't know.
30 of 208 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which hidden pigments produce the yellows and oranges of autumn foliage?
Carotenoids
Carotenoids, the yellow xanthophylls and orange beta-carotene, sit in the leaf all season and only show through once the green fades; the same pigment family colours carrots and egg yolks.
Q 02Autumn yellows were in the leaf all along, but which pigment do trees make fresh each fall to turn leaves red?
Anthocyanins
Red is the only autumn colour a tree has to work for: anthocyanins are made fresh from sugars trapped in the leaf as it seals off, while the yellows are simply unmasked.
Q 03Seeds of which tree are threaded on strings for the British autumn game of conkers?
Horse chestnut
Conkers are the glossy brown seeds of the horse chestnut (Aesculus hippocastanum); each is threaded on a string and players take turns striking an opponent's conker until one shatters.
Q 04From which ancient language is the English word 'autumn' derived?
Latin
Latin autumnus reached English through French in the 1300s; 'fall', now the American word, began in England too, as a shortening of the 1500s phrase 'fall of the leaf'.
Q 05What traditional name is given to the full lunar phase that falls nearest the autumnal equinox?
Harvest Moon
The Harvest Moon is the full moon nearest the autumnal equinox; it can land up to two weeks either side of it, so in some years it is an October moon.
Q 06Munich's Oktoberfest, despite its name, opens in which month?
September
September: the festival now opens in the second half of that month and closes in early October, so only its final days fall in the month it is named after.
Q 07What nickname is given to tourists who travel to New England each autumn to admire the foliage?
Leaf peepers
Leaf peepers, a term first recorded in the 1960s, are a mainstay of the region's autumn economy, though Vermonters have complained of visitors jamming roads and trespassing for photos.
Q 08What term describes the autumn feeding frenzy of bears and other large hibernators?
Hyperphagia
Hyperphagia is the late-summer and autumn spell of excessive eating and drinking in which a bear makes feeding almost a full-time job to fatten up for hibernation; torpor is the low-metabolism state itself.
Q 09Which English Romantic poet, dead at 25, wrote the ode 'To Autumn' that opens 'Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness'?
John Keats
John Keats wrote 'To Autumn' in 1819; it proved the last of his great odes, and within days, short of money, he was telling friends he would take a cheap lodging and write for the papers.
Q 10Why do meteorologists start autumn on 1 September instead of at the equinox?
To keep records in whole months
To keep records in whole months: seasons that begin on the 1st cover the same days every year, so climate statistics are easy to compare, whereas astronomical seasons shift and vary in length.
Q 11Shakespeare's Sonnet 73 calls autumn's leafless boughs 'bare ruined' what, 'where late the sweet birds sang'?
Choirs
Choirs: the birds that sang there have gone with the leaves, but the sonnet then turns it round, since seeing how little time is left 'makes thy love more strong'.
Q 12As late summer ends, which environmental change is the main trigger for trees to begin reclaiming nutrients from their leaves?
Shortening daylight
Shortening daylight, reinforced by cooling nights, tells a broadleaf tree to pull nitrogen and other nutrients back out of its leaves before sealing them off and dropping them.
Q 13Which Pre-Raphaelite, the painter of 'Ophelia', showed four girls piling up fallen leaves in 'Autumn Leaves'?
Q 21Which fish fight their way upriver each autumn to spawn in the stream where they hatched?
Salmon
Salmon find their home river by smell, a memory laid down when they left it as young fish; a few lose the trail and spawn in a neighbouring stream instead.
Q 22Which genus, tapped for syrup in spring, is famous for red, orange, and yellow autumn foliage?
Maple
Maples, tapped for syrup in early spring, run from bright yellow through orange to fluorescent red in autumn, and single trees often colour unevenly.
Q 23After the harvest party that opens Vivaldi's 'Autumn', the slow movement carries a marking describing what?
Sleeping drunkards
Sleeping drunkards is the caption Vivaldi wrote over the slow movement: he published each concerto with a sonnet and keyed its lines to the music, so the revellers doze before the hunt sets out.
John Everett Millais
John Everett Millais painted it in his garden in Perth, intending, his wife Effie wrote, a picture 'full of beauty and without a subject'; its twilight is usually read as an image of passing time.
Q 14Which of these conifers drops all its needles every autumn?
European larch
The European larch is a deciduous conifer: its soft needles turn gold in October and fall, leaving bare branches until spring, while pines, spruces and firs keep theirs through winter.
Q 15Which pigment is broken down in autumn, unmasking the others?
Chlorophyll
Chlorophyll, the green pigment, is broken down into colourless compounds as the tree pulls nutrients back out of the leaf, letting the yellow and orange pigments beneath show through.
Q 16What term describes trees that shed all their leaves each autumn?
Deciduous
Deciduous comes from a word meaning 'tending to fall', which is why the same term is used for milk teeth and for antlers that drop off each year.
Q 17Which insect migrates each autumn from across North America to a few mountain forests in central Mexico, thousands of kilometres away?
Monarch butterfly
The eastern monarch butterfly population squeezes into so few Mexican fir groves each winter that scientists track it by the hectares of forest the clusters cover, not by counting insects.
Q 18During which Jewish autumn harvest festival, called the Festival of Ingathering in the Torah, do families eat meals in a temporary hut?
Sukkot
Sukkot's hut, the sukkah, recalls the shelters of the Exodus; the Torah calls the festival the Festival of Ingathering, marking the end of the agricultural year in the Land of Israel.
Q 19Which of these holidays is widely celebrated in autumn, particularly on October 31st?
Halloween
Halloween, 31 October, is the eve of All Hallows' Day and overlaps the old Gaelic quarter day Samhain, kept from 31 October to 1 November in Ireland, Scotland and the Isle of Man.
Q 20What term describes a spell of unseasonably warm, dry weather in late autumn?
Indian summer
An Indian summer is an American term: it reached Britain only in the 1800s, where the same warm autumn spell had long been called St Martin's summer after the saint's day on 11 November.
Q 24Candy corn, a Halloween staple invented in the 1880s, was long marketed under what farm-themed name?
Chicken Feed
Chicken Feed was the Goelitz company's name for it from 1898, later with a rooster on the box: corn was then seen as cheap fodder for farm animals, not as food for people.
Q 25What was missing from Starbucks' spiced autumn latte recipe from its 2003 launch until 2015?
Any real pumpkin
Starbucks' Pumpkin Spice Latte launched in 2003 without any real pumpkin; in 2015 the chain added pumpkin puree to the sauce and dropped its artificial colouring.
Q 26Which Roman goddess of fruit trees and orchards is linked to Halloween's apple customs?
Pomona
Pomona takes her name from pomum, the Roman word for fruit; some writers suggest the Romans brought her apple rites to Britain, where they merged with older autumn festivals.
Q 27Which US president made the Thanksgiving turkey pardon an official annual tradition in the late 1980s?
George H. W. Bush
George H. W. Bush made the pardon official in 1989; Reagan had only joked about pardoning his turkey two years earlier, when the bird was already bound for a petting zoo.
Q 28Who skips trick-or-treating to wait in the pumpkin patch in 'It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown'?
Linus
Linus spends the night in the pumpkin patch, certain the Great Pumpkin rises from the most sincere one, while Charlie Brown goes trick-or-treating and is handed nothing but rocks.
Q 29Which character traditionally brings up the rear of the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade?
Santa Claus
Santa Claus rides the final float, his arrival marking the start of the Christmas season; in the late 1920s the giant balloons were simply released at the end, with a reward for whoever found one.
Q 30Which sport's championship is nicknamed the 'Fall Classic'?
Baseball
Baseball's World Series has been played every autumn since 1903 with two gaps: in 1904 the National League's Giants refused to face the rival league's champions, and in 1994 a players' strike wiped it out.