Cyanide
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40 free Cyanide trivia questions with answers — science & nature quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Cyanide has a reputation as the poisoner's favorite, yet most people meet it every day without knowing. It hides in orchard fruit and staple crops, drifts through deep space, and does quiet work in mines, factories and even the kitchen cupboard. This quiz gathers the best cyanide fun facts: where the chemical occurs in nature, what it actually does inside a cell, which animals make it or shrug off doses that would kill others, and how it shaped detective fiction, wartime history and a few notorious crimes. Some questions cover the chemistry itself, pitched so that no lab coat is needed. It suits science fans, true-crime readers and anyone who likes a did-you-know fact with a dark edge. Every answer comes with a short explanation, so the surprising part sticks.
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Q 01Which part of an apple contains amygdalin, a compound that can release cyanide when crushed and digested?
Seeds
Seeds hold only a tiny amount, and the US National Library of Medicine's hazardous substances database records no case of poisoning from eating them.
Q 02Hydrogen cyanide is often said to smell like which food, although some people cannot detect the odor at all?
Bitter almonds
Bitter almonds is the classic comparison, but the ability to smell hydrogen cyanide comes down to a genetic trait, so many people get no warning from their nose.
Q 03In 1910, finding the cyanide-related gas cyanogen in the tail of which comet led to sales of anti-comet pills?
Halley
Halley's Comet swept Earth through its tail that May, and despite astronomers' reassurances people panic-bought gas masks along with the quack pills.
Q 04Which painkiller was laced with potassium cyanide in the 1982 Chicago poisonings that reshaped medicine packaging?
Tylenol
Tylenol's maker recalled an estimated 31 million bottles, and tamper-resistant packaging followed. Nobody has ever been charged with the poisonings.
Q 05Which British crime writer poisoned her characters' champagne in the 1945 mystery novel Sparkling Cyanide?
Agatha Christie
Agatha Christie learned her poisons by working in hospital dispensaries during both world wars, and they turn up in more than half of her novels.
Q 06The cyanide process developed in Glasgow in 1887 transformed the mining of which metal from low-grade ore?
Gold
Gold dissolves in a weak cyanide solution. First used on South Africa's Rand in 1890, the method set off an investment boom as bigger mines opened.
Q 07Which household adhesive, discovered during a wartime search for clear gun-sight plastic, is made from cyanoacrylate?
Super glue
Super glue was rejected in 1942 because it stuck to everything it touched, then reached the market in 1958. A spray version later slowed bleeding in soldiers wounded in Vietnam.
Q 08Which tropical root crop, the source of tapioca, must be carefully prepared because it can release cyanide?
Cassava
Cassava roots, peels and leaves are dangerous raw, yet more than 500 million people depend on the crop, so it is soaked, fermented or cooked before eating.
Q 09Which British codebreaker died of cyanide poisoning in 1954, with a half-eaten apple found beside his bed?
Alan Turing
Alan Turing's inquest ruled suicide, but the apple was never tested, and one philosopher argues he accidentally inhaled fumes from a home electroplating experiment.
Q 10Which kitchen staple often contains tiny amounts of ferrocyanide, a harmless cyanide compound added to stop clumping?
Table salt
Table salt can carry ferrocyanides, labelled E535, E536 and E538, because the cyanide is bound so tightly to iron that the body cannot break it loose.
Q 11In 1978, more than 900 Peoples Temple members died at Jonestown, most from cyanide, in which South American country?
Guyana
Guyana's remote commune served the poison in a tub of grape Flavor Aid, a drink widely misremembered as Kool-Aid, although both brands were on site.
Q 12Which Russian mystic, by his killer's account, seemed unaffected by cakes and wine laced with cyanide in 1916?
Grigori Rasputin
Grigori Rasputin was finally shot, and the autopsy recorded no poison at all. His daughter said he avoided sweet food and would never have eaten the cakes.
Q 13Which cyanide-based pesticide, invented in Germany in the 1920s, was used in Nazi extermination camp gas chambers?
Zyklon B
Q 21Hydroxocobalamin, an antidote for cyanide poisoning sold as Cyanokit, is a form of which nutrient?
Vitamin B12
Vitamin B12 in this form grabs cyanide to become cyanocobalamin, which the kidneys can safely flush out. The antidote kit won US approval in 2006.
Q 22Kernels of which fruit, sold as a cancer remedy despite being ineffective, can cause fatal cyanide poisoning?
Apricot
Apricot kernels supply the compound behind laetrile, a supposed cure promoted since the 1950s and described in medical literature as a canonical example of quackery.
Q 23Cyanide fishing, which stuns reef fish for the aquarium trade, is believed to have begun in the 1950s in which country?
Philippines
Zyklon B, meaning Cyclone B, was sold in sealed canisters for delousing clothing and fumigating ships, warehouses and trains long before the Holocaust.
Q 14Which Nazi leader swallowed a cyanide capsule the night before his scheduled hanging at Nuremberg in 1946?
Hermann Göring
Hermann Göring had asked to be shot as a soldier and was refused. How he got the capsule is still debated; a second one turned up hidden in his hair cream.
Q 15Who died by biting a cyanide capsule in a Berlin bunker in April 1945, less than two days after marrying Adolf Hitler?
Eva Braun
Eva Braun was 33. A day earlier, one of the capsules obtained for the couple had been tested on Blondi, Hitler's German Shepherd.
Q 16A cyanide ion is made of one carbon atom joined by a triple bond to one atom of which element?
Nitrogen
Nitrogen completes the cyano group, written CN. The ion has the same number of electrons as carbon monoxide, another notorious poison.
Q 17Hydrogen cyanide was first isolated in the 18th century from which artists' pigment, used in Hokusai's Great Wave?
Prussian blue
Prussian blue is believed to have been an accident, made in Berlin around 1706 when a paint maker used potash tainted with blood. German calls hydrogen cyanide 'blue acid' after it.
Q 18Which type of animal is the Madagascan bamboo-eater that takes in twelve times a normally lethal cyanide dose daily?
Lemur
Lemur is the answer: one rare bamboo-eating species gets through about 500 g of cyanide-laced shoots a day, and nobody has worked out how it avoids being poisoned.
Q 19Cyanide stops cells using oxygen by blocking the enzyme cytochrome c oxidase, found in which part of the cell?
Mitochondria
Mitochondria can no longer make ATP, the cell's energy supply, so the tissues that need the most energy, the brain and the heart, are hit hardest.
Q 20Motyxia, a glow-in-the-dark genus that makes cyanide as a chemical defense, belongs to which group of arthropods?
Millipedes
Millipedes of this genus are blind, and the ones that glow brightest tend to have the biggest cyanide glands, so the light works as a warning to predators.
The Philippines is where an estimated 70% to 90% of exported aquarium fish are caught this way, and up to two thirds of the stunned fish die in transport.
Q 24The 2000 Baia Mare cyanide spill, which killed fish along the Tisza and Danube rivers, began at a mine in which country?
Romania
Romania's spill began when a dam holding contaminated water burst on a winter night. It has been called Europe's worst environmental disaster since Chernobyl.
Q 25M44 devices, spring-loaded traps that fire sodium cyanide into an animal's mouth, are set to kill which US predator?
Coyotes
Coyotes set off the charge by biting and pulling a scented bait. The M44 replaced a 1930s device that was actually called the Coyote Getter.
Q 26Which US state carried out the country's first lethal gas execution in 1924, using cyanide in a converted butcher shop?
Nevada
Nevada's guards first tried pumping the gas into the prisoner's cell while he slept, but it leaked out, which is why a makeshift chamber had to be built.
Q 27Wallace Carothers, the DuPont chemist who died by drinking potassium cyanide in 1937, invented which fiber?
Nylon
Nylon was not announced to the public until October 1938, about a year and a half after his death. Carothers had long carried a capsule of cyanide attached to his watch chain.
Q 28In which comedy play and 1944 Cary Grant film do two aunts serve lonely men elderberry wine spiked with cyanide?
Arsenic and Old Lace
Arsenic and Old Lace has the Brewster sisters spike their wine with three poisons at once. It was by far the most successful of Joseph Kesselring's twelve plays.
Q 29In which James Bond film does villain Raoul Silva reveal how a failed hydrogen cyanide capsule disfigured him?
Skyfall
Skyfall's Silva, played by Javier Bardem, is a former agent who wants M dead for betraying him to the Chinese government, which left him to be tortured.
Q 30Which country uses cyanide pellets to control possums, an introduced marsupial that spreads tuberculosis among cattle?
New Zealand
New Zealand requires a license to store or use the poison, and packs it into pellets because possums otherwise learn to shy away from bait.