Cotton Trivia
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49 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 49 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Cotton fibre is almost pure what?
Cellulose
Cellulose makes up the great bulk of raw cotton fibre, and nearly all of it once the fibre is scoured, leaving only traces of waxes, pectins, proteins and water.
Q 02What is the protective case in which cotton fibre grows around the seeds called?
A boll
A boll is the rounded case that splits open at maturity to expose the fluffy fibre, which in the wild helps the seeds disperse on wind and water.
Q 03The cotton genus Gossypium belongs to which group of plants, alongside hibiscus and okra?
The mallows
The mallows, family Malvaceae, include cotton along with hibiscus, okra and cacao; the greatest diversity of wild cotton species is found in Mexico, then Australia.
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 05From which city does the name of the fine cotton cloth muslin derive?
Mosul
Mosul, on the Tigris in present-day Iraq, gave muslin its name through the Italian mussolina; European traders associated the fine cotton cloth with the city.
Q 06Roughly what share of world cotton production comes from Gossypium hirsutum, or upland cotton?
90%
90% of the world's cotton comes from upland cotton, a species native to Mexico and Central America that dominates because of its yield and adaptability.
Q 07How many commercially grown species of cotton are there?
Four
Four species are grown commercially: two domesticated in the Americas, including upland cotton, and two Old World species from South Asia and Africa, all tamed in antiquity.
Q 08Which extra-long-staple species is sold under names such as Sea Island, Egyptian and Pima?
Gossypium barbadense
Gossypium barbadense, named by Linnaeus after Barbados, has the longest and finest fibres of the cultivated cottons; it was first domesticated in northwestern South America.
Q 09The oldest known cotton thread in the Old World, strung through eight copper beads, was found at Mehrgarh in which modern country?
Pakistan
Pakistan is home to Mehrgarh, the Neolithic site in Balochistan where the thread preserved inside copper beads was dated to the sixth millennium BC.
Q 10What was the quilted cotton armour worn by Aztec warriors called?
Ichcahuipilli
Ichcahuipilli, a quilted cotton vest one to two fingers thick, was the standard Aztec body armour; it stopped arrows and obsidian blades so well that Spanish conquistadors adopted it.
Q 11Which ancient historian wrote that trees in India bore wool finer than sheep's?
Herodotus
Herodotus, in the fifth century BC, wrote of wild Indian trees whose fruit was a wool surpassing that of sheep in beauty and goodness, an early description of cotton.
Q 12Roughly how much does a standard American cotton bale weigh?
About 500 pounds
About 500 pounds is the standard American bale, 480 pounds net once bagging and ties are excluded; it is compressed at the gin into a dense rectangular block bound with steel ties.
Q 13Which of Alexander the Great's contemporaries reported to Seleucus that in India 'there being trees on which wool grows'?
Megasthenes
Q 21Before mechanical gins, roughly how many hours of labour did it take to produce one bale of cotton?
Over 600
Over 600 hours of hand labour went into a bale when the seeds had to be picked out by hand; the saw gin cut that to roughly 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
King Cotton was the slogan of Southern politicians who argued Britain's dependence on the fibre would force it to back their cause; growing it was the main work of enslaved people.
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
Megasthenes, Seleucus's ambassador to the Mauryan court around 300 BC, recorded the wool-bearing trees in his Indica, probably describing the tree cotton native to the subcontinent.
Q 14Which Mughal province was the empire's most important centre of cotton production?
Bengal
Bengal, centred on Dhaka, was the Mughal Empire's leading cotton region, famed for fine muslin; India held about a quarter of the world's 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
Calico and chintz, printed and painted cottons from India, soon outsold spices among the Company's imports, and Parliament answered with the Calico Acts 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
1774 was the year the Calico Acts were repealed, freeing British mills to make and sell all-cotton cloth and setting off a boom in mill building and raw-cotton imports.
Q 17Who invented the spinning jenny in Lancashire around 1764?
James Hargreaves
James Hargreaves, a Lancashire weaver, built the jenny about 1764 to spin several threads at once; Arkwright's water frame (1769) and Crompton's mule (1779) followed.
Q 18Which English city earned the nickname 'Cottonopolis'?
Manchester
Manchester, hub of the cotton mills of north-west England, was dubbed Cottonopolis in the 19th century, when its warehouses and surrounding mill towns dominated world cotton spinning and trading.
Q 19Which American inventor patented the modern cotton gin in 1794?
Eli Whitney
Eli Whitney's 1794 patent covered a wire-toothed gin that pulled fibre from short-staple seeds; by making upland cotton profitable it drove a huge expansion of slavery in the American South.
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.
The Lancashire Cotton Famine of 1861–65 idled mills and threw hundreds of thousands out of work when the Union blockade, and the Confederacy's own embargo, cut off American cotton.
Q 24Which country's cotton boom during the American Civil War ended in bankruptcy in 1876 and British occupation in 1882?
Egypt
Egypt rode the wartime boom under Khedive Isma'il, who borrowed heavily from European bankers; when cheap American cotton returned, revenues collapsed and British and French creditors took control.
Q 25Which Frenchman persuaded Muhammad Ali Pasha to grow extra-long-staple cotton in Lower Egypt in the early 19th century?
M. Jumel
M. Jumel, a French textile engineer, noticed long-staple plants in a Cairo garden around 1820 and persuaded the Pasha to grow them commercially; the Pasha then monopolised the cotton trade.
Q 26According to Gandhi's famous description, Indian labourers picking cotton for British mills were paid how much a day?
Seven cents
Seven cents a day, Gandhi said, was what Indian pickers earned before the cotton was shipped to England, spun and woven in mills, 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
Khadi, hand-spun and hand-woven cloth, became the symbol of swadeshi self-reliance; Gandhi took up the spinning wheel in 1918, and Congress later required its members to spin yarn.
Q 28The boll weevil crossed into the United States from Mexico near which Texas town in 1892?
Brownsville
Brownsville, at the mouth of the Rio Grande, is where the weevil entered in 1892; it then spread 40 to 160 miles a year and had reached every cotton-growing region by the 1920s.
Q 29The citizens of which Alabama town erected a monument to the boll weevil in 1919?
Enterprise
Enterprise, in Coffee County, unveiled its monument to the weevil in 1919, crediting the pest with forcing local farmers to diversify away from cotton into crops such as peanuts.
Q 30Denim takes its name from which French city?
Nîmes
Nîmes gave its name to denim, a contraction of 'serge de Nîmes'; Jacob Davis and Levi Strauss patented riveted denim work trousers in 1873.