Avocado Trivia
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56 free Avocado trivia questions with answers — food & drink quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
52 free Avocado trivia questions with answers. Avocados are botanically a berry, evolutionarily a puzzle, and economically the fruit that turned a Californian mail carrier's stubborn seedling into a billion-dollar industry. This quiz covers all of it: where the avocado came from and how it got its name, why every Hass tree on Earth descends from one plant in La Habra Heights, which country grows a quarter of the world's crop, and what happens when a horse eats the leaves. There are questions on guacamole (its Nahuatl meaning, its first English description by a 17th-century privateer, the record-breaking batch made in Michoacán), on avocado toast and the millennial spending row it started, on ripening tricks, regional names from palta to zaboca, and on the environmental cost of the world's most-traded fruit. Difficulty runs from easy questions anyone who has made guacamole can answer to expert ones about cultivars, patents and botany. Every answer is checked against a source, mostly Wikipedia and grower organisations, so you can use the set for a pub quiz, a classroom or a Cinco de Mayo party without worrying about a wrong answer.
30 of 56 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01The avocado has one big seed like a peach, but botanists class its fruit as what?
A berry
A berry, in the botanist's sense: a fleshy fruit with no stony shell around the seed, which is what a peach or cherry has. A few texts still file the avocado with those stone fruits, because the dividing line is not sharp.
Q 02The avocado tree belongs to the same plant family as which two kitchen staples?
Cinnamon and bay laurel
Cinnamon and bay laurel share the laurel family with the avocado, and the kinship has a cost. Laurel wilt, a beetle-borne fungus that has killed wild redbay laurels across the American South, now threatens Florida's avocado groves too.
Q 03Which classic American salad, born at Hollywood's Brown Derby restaurant, counts avocado among its standard ingredients?
Cobb salad
Cobb salad is named for Robert Cobb, who ran the Brown Derby. As the story goes, he raided the kitchen for a midnight snack and chopped together what he found: lettuce, an avocado, bacon, chicken, egg and Roquefort.
Q 04In 1970s American kitchens, the craze for 'avocado green' appliances went hand in hand with which other colour?
Harvest gold
Harvest gold and avocado green ruled the decade's refrigerators and stoves. They then fell so far from fashion that the pair became shorthand for a dated kitchen, and dealers found such pieces hard to sell.
Q 05What was Rudolph Hass's day job when he raised the original Hass avocado tree in the 1920s?
Mail carrier
Mail carrier: he was earning 25 cents an hour at the Pasadena post office when he bought his grove, and he never gave the job up. The patent on the world's most widely grown avocado brought him less than $5,000.
Q 06How did growers get round Rudolph Hass's 1935 avocado patent?
Grafting cuttings
Grafting cuttings from one bought tree could turn a whole grove into Hass trees without paying again, so the patent earned Rudolph Hass only about $5,000 before it expired in 1952.
Q 07What killed the original Hass avocado 'mother tree', which was cut down in 2002?
Root rot
Root rot ate at the tree for years before it was felled; its wood was kept at a nursery while growers debated carving it into plaques, pens or guacamole bowls.
Q 08In which county did the original Hass avocado tree grow?
Los Angeles
Los Angeles County's La Habra Heights, on the Orange County line, was grove country when Hass planted there; by the time the tree died it stood in front of a house among suburban streets.
Q 09The word 'avocado' comes via Spanish 'aguacate' from a word in which language?
Nahuatl
The Nahuatl word āhuacatl was also used as a euphemism for 'testicle', which is where the popular claim about the word's origin comes from.
Q 10By what reptilian name was the avocado commonly known in Florida in the early 1900s?
Alligator pear
Alligator pear began as a garbling of the fruit's Spanish-derived name; growers found it off-putting and campaigned to make 'avocado' the standard name instead.
Q 11The name 'guacamole' comes from a word that literally translates as what?
Avocado sauce
Avocado sauce is the literal meaning: the fruit's old name joined to mōlli, 'sauce', the same word that gives Mexican mole its name.
Q 12Which South American country, better known for coffee, was the world's second-largest avocado grower in 2024?
Colombia
Colombia grew about 1.3 million tonnes that year, on Andean slopes wet enough that most of its orchards get by on rain alone.
Q 13An avocado won't begin to ripen until what happens to it?
It is picked from the tree
It is picked from the tree: an avocado matures on the branch but stays hard until it is cut loose, so growers can leave a crop hanging for months and pick to order.
Q 21What reputation did the avocado carry among the Aztecs?
An aphrodisiac
An aphrodisiac: the Aztecs are said to have held that a fruit's shape passed on its powers, and they saw in the avocado the shape of a testicle.
Q 22Avocado growing is thought to have begun in the Tehuacán Valley of which state, just south-east of Mexico City?
Puebla
Puebla's Coxcatlán Cave, in that valley, held avocado remains some 10,000 years old, left by foragers who camped there in the seasons when food was plentiful.
Q 23What fruit will a tree grown from a Hass avocado seed bear?
A new, non-Hass variety
A new, non-Hass variety: a seed shuffles its parents' genes, so the tree it grows into is a one-off, and it can take ten years or more to fruit at all.
Q 14Which US state has named the avocado its state fruit?
California
California has claimed the avocado as its state fruit since 2013 and grows about 90% of the US crop, yet that now covers only a fraction of what Americans eat.
Q 15Fallbrook, the self-styled 'Avocado Capital of the World', lies in which county?
San Diego
San Diego County's Fallbrook gave itself the title and throws an avocado festival every year, but rival growing towns abroad claim the very same crown.
Q 16Placing an avocado in a bag with a banana speeds up ripening because bananas give off which gas?
Ethylene
Ethylene is a plant hormone that ripe fruit gives off; packers pump the same gas into ripening rooms so that hard avocados reach the shelf ready to eat.
Q 17What were shoppers filmed doing that led Gil Henry to pioneer avocado 'ripening rooms'?
Squeezing them and putting them back
Squeezing them and putting them back was what the hidden camera caught: shoppers wanted ripe fruit, so in 1983 Henry began ripening avocados before they reached the store.
Q 18What toxin in avocado leaves and skins is dangerous to livestock, birds and pets?
Persin
Persin doesn't trouble people eating the ripe flesh, yet canaries have died from the same fruit and browsing goats from the leaves.
Q 19What is traditionally added to cut avocado or guacamole to slow it turning brown?
Lime or lemon juice
Lime or lemon juice keeps guacamole green for longer; the flesh browns because an enzyme, polyphenol oxidase, goes to work as soon as it meets the air.
Q 20Most of the fat in an avocado is which type?
Monounsaturated
Monounsaturated fat makes up about two-thirds of the total, most of it oleic acid, so an avocado's fat profile resembles olive oil's.
Q 24A magazine picture of an avocado tree hung with what persuaded Hass to buy his grove?
Dollar bills
Dollar bills dangled from the tree in the picture, so Hass put his savings and a loan from his sister into a 1.5-acre grove, where one stubborn seedling made his name.
Q 25An avocado tree can open about a million flowers in a season; roughly how many become fruit?
150
About 150 is typical, one fruit for every 10,000 or so flowers; the tree sheds the rest, many of them as fruitlets no bigger than a pea or a walnut.
Q 26A 2019 genetic study found the Hass avocado is 61% Mexican and 39% which other avocado race?
Guatemalan
Guatemalan genes make up the smaller share; the seed came from a Whittier nurseryman who planted whatever seeds he could find, so nobody knows which variety was the parent.
Q 27Besides two Mesoamerican highland types, which third avocado race, the lowland one, gives Florida its summer crop?
West Indian
West Indian avocados are the least cold-tolerant of the three races, so they need a near-tropical climate such as southern Florida's, while cooler districts plant the two highland types.
Q 28The Fuerte avocado, whose name is Spanish for 'strong', earned it by surviving what in 1913?
A severe freeze
A severe freeze killed most of one nursery's young avocado trees that winter; the variety that came through was named Fuerte and led the market until Hass overtook it.
Q 29Tiny seedless avocados from unpollinated blossoms are sometimes sold in shops as what?
Cocktail avocados
Cocktail avocados are the lucky few: growers call the stoneless fruit 'cukes', and most are too small to be worth much, so few ever reach a shop.
Q 30Which future US president noted in a 1751 diary how popular avocados were in Barbados?
George Washington
George Washington, then 19, was on his only trip abroad, keeping his sick brother company; he caught smallpox on the island but still found time to write up its fruit.