Biomes
0Loading crowd target
0Loading crowd target
7correct to beat the crowd
50 free Biomes trivia questions with answers — science & nature quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
A biome is one of Earth's great communities of life, a region where the climate decides which plants and animals can make a living. Travel from the poles toward the tropics, or simply climb a tall enough mountain, and you pass through several of them in turn. Each one has its own tricks for surviving heat, cold, drought or darkness. This quiz covers the land biomes taught in school science, including forests, grasslands, deserts and the frozen north, along with wetlands and ocean habitats. Some questions ask you to identify a biome from its climate and wildlife. Others match famous places, plants and animals to the biome they belong to, and a few cover the ecologists who first mapped and named them. It is pitched for middle school and high school classes, and for anyone who enjoys a nature documentary. Every answer comes with a short explanation, so a wrong guess still teaches something, and the questions can be printed for a classroom check-yourself quiz.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which continent is classed as the largest desert on Earth?
Antarctica
Antarctica is a polar desert because so little snow falls there, and at about 14 million square km it is far bigger than the Sahara.
Q 02Camels keep going when desert food is scarce by drawing on which substance stored in their humps?
Fat
Fat fills a camel's hump, not water, and a camel that burns through its reserve is left with a hump that goes limp and droops.
Q 03Which ocean habitat covers less than 0.1% of the sea yet shelters at least a quarter of all marine species?
Coral reefs
Coral reefs occupy an area only about half the size of France, and the largest barrier reef of all is Australia's Great Barrier Reef.
Q 04Which conifer-forest biome, ringing the far north through Canada and Russia, is the largest on land?
Taiga
Taiga is also known as boreal forest or snow forest, and its freezing winters last five to seven months of the year.
Q 05Which desert, the driest non-polar place on Earth, is used to test instruments for Mars missions?
Atacama
The Atacama averages about 15 mm of rain a year, and some of its weather stations have never recorded any at all.
Q 06Which rainforest layer, a roof of treetops 30 to 45 metres up, shelters animals that never touch the ground?
Canopy
Canopy branches are so crowded with life that, by some estimates, half of all plant species on Earth grow there.
Q 07Which layer of frozen ground beneath the Arctic surface releases carbon dioxide and methane into the air as it thaws?
Permafrost
Permafrost lies under about 15% of the Northern Hemisphere's exposed land and stores roughly twice as much carbon as the atmosphere holds.
Q 08Which rainforest, the largest on Earth, is shared by nine nations and holds an estimated 390 billion trees?
Amazon
The Amazon makes up over half of the planet's remaining rainforest, and about 60% of it lies inside Brazil.
Q 09Which biome of open grassland dotted with widely spaced trees includes the Serengeti plains of East Africa?
Savanna
Savanna covers about 20% of Earth's land, and its trees stand far enough apart that sunlight reaches an unbroken carpet of grass below.
Q 10Which cold biome, where a short growing season keeps trees out, is carpeted with mosses, sedges and dwarf shrubs?
Tundra
Tundra turns soggy in summer: only the top layer of soil thaws, so meltwater cannot drain away and pools into countless lakes and marshes.
Q 11Which word describes temperate-forest trees such as oak, maple and beech that drop their leaves every autumn?
Deciduous
Deciduous trees grow in the tropics too, but there it is the dry season rather than winter cold that strips their branches bare.
Q 12Which coastal habitat, such as Chesapeake Bay, forms where a river's fresh water mixes with the salty sea?
Estuary
Estuary waters are nurseries for the young of many sea fish and shellfish, and 22 of the world's 32 largest cities stood beside one in the early 1990s.
Q 13Which salt-tolerant trees form the Sundarbans, the tiger-haunted tidal forest shared by India and Bangladesh?
Mangroves
Mangroves filter out salt and breathe through aerial roots, and the Sundarbans is the largest forest of them in the world.
Q 21Which word names the grassland belt that stretches some 8,000 km from Hungary to Manchuria?
Steppe
Steppe grassland gave riders an open road across Eurasia, and it played a major part in spreading the horse, the wheel and Indo-European languages.
Q 22Which fertile grassland covering Uruguay and the plains around Buenos Aires is the homeland of the gaucho horsemen?
Pampas
Pampas grassland spreads over more than 1.2 million square km, taking in the southern tip of Brazil as well as Uruguay and central Argentina.
Q 23Which drought-hardy shrubland of coastal California is shaped by hot dry summers and mild wet winters?
Chaparral
Chaparral shrubs such as manzanita and chamise are built for drought, with small, thick, leathery leaves that stay on the plant all year.
Q 14What are plants such as orchids and bromeliads called when they perch on tree branches instead of rooting in soil?
Epiphytes
Epiphytes take nothing from their host but a perch, drinking rain, fog and dew instead, and a single rainforest tree can carry several tonnes of them.
Q 15Besides temperature, which climate measurement best predicts whether land becomes forest, grassland or desert?
Precipitation
Precipitation and temperature are the two axes of the classic chart ecologists use to sort biomes, with desert at the dry end and rainforest at the wet.
Q 16Which imaginary line do the world's tropical rainforests cluster around, mostly within 10 degrees north or south?
Equator
Equator warmth and year-round rain feed forests that are home to about half of all the plant and animal species on the planet.
Q 17Which weather pattern leaves the Great Basin of Utah and Nevada dry on the downwind side of the Sierra Nevada?
Rain shadow
Rain shadow deserts form because air climbing a mountain range drops its moisture on the way up, then warms and dries out as it sinks down the far side.
Q 18Which fungus-and-alga partnerships, wrongly called reindeer moss, do caribou dig through snow to eat in winter?
Lichens
Lichens are low in protein but high in carbohydrates, a winter staple that spares reindeer from burning through their stored body reserves.
Q 19Which grazer of North America's prairies was hunted from tens of millions down to about a thousand animals by 1889?
Bison
Bison still shape the grasslands they graze: the dusty hollows they wallow in boost the variety of prairie plants and animals.
Q 20Which rainforest mammal of Central and South America grows green algae in its fur as camouflage?
Sloth
Sloth fur is a tiny world of its own: the algae feed moths that live nowhere else, and the animal climbs down to the ground only about once a week.
Q 24Which giant cactus of the Sonoran Desert often lives past 150 years and may not grow its first arm until 75?
Saguaro
Saguaro seedlings are painfully slow starters, standing only about 6 mm tall after two years, and some plants never grow any arms at all.
Q 25Which coastal African desert, perhaps the oldest on Earth, has beetles that drink fog condensing on their own backs?
Namib
Namib wildlife runs on fog, which can blanket the coast more than 180 days a year and also waters the strange welwitschia plant found nowhere else.
Q 26Which cold Asian desert, where frost and snow can dust the dunes, gave up a famous clutch of dinosaur eggs?
Gobi
The Gobi gave fossil hunters the first dinosaur eggs recognised by science in 1923, and it spans southern Mongolia and northern China.
Q 27Which desert rodent of the American Southwest gets all the water it needs from the seeds it eats?
Kangaroo rat
Kangaroo rat kidneys save every drop by making very concentrated urine, so the Merriam's species does not need to drink water at all.
Q 28Which fox of the Sahara, the smallest fox species of all, sheds heat through its unusually large ears?
Fennec fox
Fennec fox ears do double duty: besides dumping heat, they pick up the sounds of prey moving under the sand.
Q 29Which summer counterpart of hibernation lets African lungfish and land snails sleep through spells of heat and drought?
Estivation
Estivation is also spelled aestivation, from the Latin for summer, and snails often climb plants and fence posts to wait out the heat.
Q 30Which fast-growing seaweed forms towering underwater forests along cool coasts, adding up to 60 cm in one day?
Giant kelp
Giant kelp forests are guarded by sea otters, which prey on the sea urchins that can chew through the seaweed's anchoring holdfasts.