50 free Cotton trivia questions with answers — technology quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
This cotton trivia quiz covers the soft, fluffy fibre that clothes the world, from Neolithic threads at Mehrgarh to genetically modified crops and a seed that sprouted on the far side of the Moon. The easy questions handle the basics: what cotton is made of, the part of the plant it grows in, the machine Eli Whitney patented, the city called Cottonopolis, the country that grows the most and the fabric behind blue jeans. From there it moves through the fibre's history: the four commercial species, Aztec tribute, medieval Europe's belief in plant-borne sheep, the East India Company's calicos, Hargreaves' spinning jenny and the Lancashire mills. The harder half is for history and textile buffs: the Calico Acts, King Cotton and the Union blockade, the Lancashire Cotton Famine, Egypt's cotton bankruptcy, Gandhi's khadi and the boll weevil that got its own monument in Alabama, plus the science of linters, gossypol, Bt cotton and cotton's enormous thirst for water. If you enjoyed our Industrial Revolution or fashion quizzes, this is the deep dive on the fibre in your T-shirt. Every answer was checked against the encyclopaedia entries for cotton, the cotton gin, denim, the boll weevil and the related places, people and inventions before publishing.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Cotton fibre is almost pure what?
Cellulose
It carries only minor traces of waxes, fats, pectins and water.
Q 02What is the protective case in which cotton fibre grows around the seeds called?
A boll
In the wild the fluffy fibre helps the plant disperse its seeds.
Q 03The cotton genus Gossypium belongs to which group of plants, alongside hibiscus and okra?
The mallows
The greatest diversity of wild cotton species is found in Mexico, followed by Australia and Africa.
Q 04The word 'cotton' comes from which language's word 'qutn'?
Arabic
That in turn derives, ironically, from a Hebrew word for a garment made of linen.
Q 05Which country is the world's largest producer of cotton?
India
India and China each grow around 17 to 18 million tonnes a year, mostly for their own textile industries; the US is the biggest exporter.
Q 06Roughly what share of world cotton production comes from Gossypium hirsutum, or upland cotton?
90%
It is native to Central America and Mexico; the extra-long-staple species supplies just over 5%.
Q 07How many commercially grown species of cotton are there?
Four
Two are New World species and two Old World, all domesticated in antiquity.
Q 08Which extra-long-staple species is sold under names such as Sea Island, Egyptian and Pima?
Gossypium barbadense
Linnaeus named it for the cotton he encountered in Barbados, though its native range is Colombia to Peru.
Q 09The oldest known cotton thread in the Old World, strung through eight copper beads, was found at Mehrgarh in which modern country?
Pakistan
It dates to the sixth millennium BC; cotton bolls from a Mexican cave are dated to 5500 BC.
Q 10How much cotton did the peoples between the Río Santiago and Río Balsas send their Aztec rulers as tribute each year?
About 116 million pounds
Domestication of upland cotton in Mexico dates to between about 3400 and 2300 BC.
Q 11Which ancient historian's claim that Indian trees grew wool led medieval Europeans to imagine plant-borne sheep?
Herodotus
Several Germanic languages still name the fibre as if it grew on trees, and John Mandeville wrote in 1350 of a tree bearing tiny lambs.
Q 12What does the German word for cotton, Baumwolle, literally mean?
Tree wool
Northern Europeans knew only that the imported fibre came from a plant, and assumed it was a tree.
Q 13Which of Alexander the Great's contemporaries reported to Seleucus that in India 'there being trees on which wool grows'?
Megasthenes
He was probably describing tree cotton, Gossypium arboreum, native to the subcontinent.
Q 21Before mechanical gins, roughly how many hours of labour did it take to produce one bale of cotton?
Over 600
The gin Whitney manufactured cut that to about a dozen hours per bale.
Q 22By the mid-19th century, what royal nickname described the fibre's dominance of the Southern American economy?
King Cotton
Cultivating and harvesting it became the leading occupation of enslaved people in the United States.
Q 23During the American Civil War, the collapse of raw fibre imports caused a depression in North West England known as what?
The Lancashire Cotton Famine
The Confederacy had also deliberately cut exports, hoping to force Britain to recognise it.
Q 14Which Mughal province, centred on Dhaka, was the empire's most important centre of cotton production?
Bengal
India held about a quarter of the global textile trade in the early 18th century.
Q 15Which cheap, colourful Indian cloths did the East India Company introduce to Britain in the 1660s, sparking a political storm that lasted decades?
Calico and chintz
They soon outsold spices, and Parliament passed the Calico Act of 1700 to protect wool and linen weavers.
Q 16In which year were the Calico Acts repealed, triggering a wave of investment in British cotton mills?
1774
Demand for raw cotton doubled within a couple of years and kept doubling every decade into the 1840s.
Q 17Who invented the spinning jenny in Lancashire around 1764?
James Hargreaves
Arkwright's water frame followed in 1769 and Crompton's mule in 1775; Kay's flying shuttle of 1733 had created the yarn shortage.
Q 18Which English city earned the nickname 'Cottonopolis'?
Manchester
Arkwright opened the world's first steam-driven textile mill there in 1781, and by 1871 the region used 32% of global cotton.
Q 19Which American inventor patented the modern cotton gin in 1794?
Eli Whitney
He hoped it would cut labour, but by making cotton profitable it drove a huge expansion of slavery to pick the crop.
Q 20What is the word 'gin' in 'cotton gin' short for?
Engine
Handheld roller gins had been used in India since around 500 AD, and the Indian worm-gear gin is still in use today.
Q 24Which country's cotton boom during the American Civil War ended in bankruptcy in 1876 and British occupation in 1882?
Egypt
Viceroy Isma'il borrowed heavily from European bankers, and traders abandoned Egyptian cotton once cheap American exports returned.
Q 25Which Frenchman persuaded Muhammad Ali Pasha to grow extra-long-staple cotton in Lower Egypt in the early 19th century?
M. Jumel
The Pasha granted himself a monopoly on the sale and export of cotton and ordered it grown in preference to other crops.
Q 26According to Gandhi's famous description, Indian labourers picking cotton for British mills were paid how much a day?
Seven cents
The raw cotton sailed three weeks to England, was woven in Lancashire and sold back to India at European prices.
Q 27What name did Gandhi give the coarse hand-spun, hand-woven cloth he promoted for India's freedom struggle?
Khadi
The first piece was made at his Sabarmati Ashram in 1917-18, and Congress members later had to spin cotton themselves.
Q 28The boll weevil crossed into the United States from Mexico near which Texas town in 1892?
Brownsville
By the mid-1920s it had reached every cotton-growing region, spreading 40 to 160 miles a year.
Q 29The citizens of which Alabama town erected a monument to the boll weevil in 1919?
Enterprise
They credited the pest with forcing them to diversify away from cotton into crops such as peanuts.
Q 30By 1922, roughly what share of America's cotton crop was the boll weevil destroying each year?
8%
The failure of the South's main crop became one impetus for the Great Migration and even the Harlem Renaissance.