The Five Senses
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50 free The Five Senses trivia questions with answers — science & nature quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Everything you know about the world reached you through your senses. Light, sound, scent, flavour and pressure all have to be turned into nerve signals before the brain can make anything of them, and each sense organ does that job in its own surprising way. This quiz covers sight, hearing, smell, taste and touch in turn: the parts of the eye, ear, nose, tongue and skin, how they work, what happens when one of them fails, and the people who found ways around that. It also visits the animal kingdom, where some creatures hear with their legs, see colours we cannot, or detect things humans have no sense for at all. Plenty of the questions are pitched for children and classrooms, and the harder ones will stretch older students and adults. Every answer comes with a short explanation, so the quiz works as a science lesson warm-up, a homework check or a family game.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which stirrup-shaped bone of the middle ear is the smallest and lightest bone in the human body?
Stapes
The stapes takes its name from the Medieval Latin for stirrup. Classical Latin had no such word, because stirrups did not exist in the ancient world.
Q 02Which raised-dot system, devised by a blind French teenager, lets people read with their fingertips?
Braille
Braille began as an improvement on night writing, a tactile code built from 12-dot cells. Louis Braille, aged fifteen, cut each cell down to six dots.
Q 03Which chirping insects listen to one another's songs through hearing organs set in their front legs?
Crickets
Crickets hear through thin membranes on the shins of their front legs. Only the males sing, and they do it by scraping their leathery front wings together.
Q 04Which leafy herb tastes like soap to some people because of a variant in a smell-receptor gene?
Cilantro
Cilantro divides diners because of the gene OR6A2, which builds a smell receptor: people with certain variants perceive the leaves as soapy or rotten.
Q 05Which lizard can swivel each eye independently, watching two different objects at the same time?
Chameleon
Chameleon eyelids are joined, leaving only a pinhole to see through. When prey appears, both eyes swing forward to lock onto the same target.
Q 06Which fifth basic taste did the Japanese chemist Kikunae Ikeda identify while studying kelp broth?
Umami
Umami is the meaty depth of parmesan, soy sauce and ripe tomatoes. Ikeda traced it to glutamate, and within a year the seasoning MSG was on sale in Japan.
Q 07Which German composer, almost deaf in later life, had visitors write their remarks in notebooks?
Ludwig van Beethoven
Ludwig van Beethoven was almost completely deaf when he wrote his Ninth Symphony. At its premiere a singer had to turn him around to see the applause.
Q 08The coloured ring of the human eye shares its name with which Greek goddess of the rainbow?
Iris
Iris suits the part because of the many colours it can take, yet one dark pigment, melanin, lies behind every normal shade from brown to blue.
Q 09Which sense depends on three fluid-filled looping canals that sit beside the hearing organ in the inner ear?
Balance
Balance relies on the semicircular canals, which stand at right angles to one another so that a head turn in any direction stirs the fluid in at least one.
Q 10Which birds make up for eyes fixed in their sockets by turning their heads as much as 270 degrees?
Owls
Owls back up that fixed stare with sharp hearing. In many species the ear openings are placed asymmetrically, which helps them judge where a sound is coming from.
Q 11Which American author, blind and deaf from infancy, learned language from words spelled into her hand?
Helen Keller
Helen Keller made her breakthrough when her teacher spelled a word on one palm while running cool water over the other. She later earned a college degree.
Q 12Which kitchen vegetable releases a gas when it is chopped that stings the eyes and brings on tears?
Onion
Onion cells release a gas, syn-propanethial-S-oxide, when they are cut. It activates nerves in the eye, and the tear glands respond by trying to flush it out.
Q 13Which two colours are hardest to tell apart in the commonest inherited form of colour blindness?
Red and green
Q 21Which light-sensitive layer lining the back of the eye does the same job as the sensor in a camera?
Retina
The retina takes its name from the Latin rete, meaning net. Herophilos, who identified it around 300 BCE, thought the layer resembled a casting net.
Q 22Which spiral chamber of the inner ear takes its name from the Greek word for snail?
Cochlea
The cochlea makes two and three-quarter turns in humans. Egg-laying mammals such as the echidna are the exception among mammals, with one that is not coiled.
Q 23Which condition makes one sense trigger another, so that a person might taste words or see sounds as colours?
Synesthesia
Synesthesia comes from the Greek for 'together' and 'sensation'. In one of its most common forms, each letter of the alphabet seems tinged with its own colour.
Red and green confusion affects up to 1 in 12 males but only about 1 in 200 females, because the genes involved sit on the X chromosome.
Q 14Which nutrient, made by the body from the carotene in carrots, does the eye need to see in dim light?
Vitamin A
Vitamin A is built into rhodopsin, the light-absorbing pigment of the eye, which is why one of the first signs of running short is night blindness.
Q 15Which ability lets dolphins and bats find prey in darkness by listening for their own calls bouncing back?
Echolocation
Echolocation was a mystery when Lazzaro Spallanzani showed in the 1790s that blinded bats still steer around obstacles. The word itself was coined only in 1944, by the zoologist Donald Griffin.
Q 16Which mammal hunts underwater with its eyes, ears and nostrils shut, sensing the electric fields of its prey?
Platypus
The platypus has about 40,000 electroreceptors arranged in rows along its bill, picking up the tiny currents made when a prey animal's muscles contract.
Q 17Which radiation, invisible to humans, lets honey bees see guiding patterns on some flower petals?
Ultraviolet
Ultraviolet markings called nectar guides point pollinators towards a flower's centre, and the hidden colour bees see there has been nicknamed bee violet.
Q 18Which dark opening in the centre of the eye widens in dim light and shrinks in bright sunshine?
Pupil
The pupil looks black because light entering it is absorbed by the tissues inside the eye, so almost none finds its way back out.
Q 19Which fish has taste sensors spread across its entire body, especially on the barbels around its mouth?
Catfish
Catfish have chemoreceptors across their whole bodies, so they taste anything they touch and can sniff out chemicals drifting through the water.
Q 20Which watery fluid must first carry the chemicals in food to the taste buds before they can be detected?
Saliva
Saliva is the liquid that ferries food chemicals to the taste receptor cells, which is why people who make too little of it can find their sense of taste dulled.
Q 24Which Greek philosopher gave sight, sound, smell, taste and touch a chapter each in his treatise On the Soul?
Aristotle
Aristotle argued that touch is the one sense every animal has, and that sight, hearing and the others all presuppose it.
Q 25Which compound from mint plants feels cool because it chemically triggers the body's cold-sensing receptors?
Menthol
Menthol does not actually cool anything. It switches on TRPM8, the receptor that real cold activates, so the nerves report a chill that is not there.
Q 26Which chemical gives chilli peppers their burn in mammals yet goes unfelt by the birds that spread the seeds?
Capsaicin
Capsaicin binds the same receptor that scalding heat sets off, so the burn is a false alarm. Work on that receptor shared the 2021 Nobel Prize in medicine.
Q 27Which condition, named from the Latin for 'to ring', makes a person hear sounds that have no outside source?
Tinnitus
Tinnitus is most often caused by hearing damage. No drug treats it, though sound generators and hearing aids may help.
Q 28What name is given to the feeling, reported by most amputees, that a missing arm or leg is still attached?
Phantom limb
Phantom limb was coined in the 1870s by the physician Silas Weir Mitchell, who likened the lingering presence to a ghost. Between 50 and 80 percent of amputees feel one.
Q 29Which sense of body position, checked in police sobriety tests, lets you touch your nose with eyes closed?
Proprioception
Proprioception is dulled by alcohol, which is why the test works: a sober person misses their own nose by no more than about 20 millimetres.
Q 30Which light receptors at the back of the eye work in daylight and let people see colour?
Cone cells
Cone cells come in three kinds in most people, each tuned to different wavelengths. Rods take over in dim light and play little part in colour, which is why colours fade at dusk.