Fruit
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50 free Fruit trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Fruit turns up everywhere once you start looking: in nursery rhymes and carols, on flags, in naval history, and in the names of colours, faulty cars and rude noises. That makes it a surprisingly rich quiz subject, because almost everyone knows the fruit bowl but few people know the stories behind it. Most of these questions are name-that-fruit clues. You get one telling fact, such as a festival, a legend, a recipe or an odd bit of botany, and pick the fruit it belongs to. The rest cover how fruit grows and ripens, the people who painted it, wore it or bred it, and the words that cooks and scientists use for its parts. The set runs from gentle openers that suit a family quiz night or a classroom to a handful of harder ones for keen gardeners and cooks. Play it here for a score, or print the questions with their answers and explanations for a quiz of your own.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which fruit gave its name to a colour that English speakers once simply called yellow-red?
Orange
Orange was a fruit before it was a colour: the shade took its name from the ripe fruit, and until the late 15th century Europeans simply called it yellow-red.
Q 02Which fruit do Spaniards eat twelve of at midnight on New Year's Eve, one for each bell strike?
Grapes
Grapes are swallowed one per chime in Spain's 'twelve grapes of luck', each standing for a month of the coming year. The custom goes back to at least 1895.
Q 03Which botanical fruit, usually sold as a vegetable, do revellers hurl at each other each August in Buñol, Spain?
Tomatoes
Tomatoes fly at La Tomatina, a street battle that began in 1945 and became a ticketed event in 2013 to cap the crowd at 20,000.
Q 04In American slang, a new car plagued by manufacturing defects is named after which fruit?
Lemon
Lemon became the label for a faulty new car, and US 'lemon laws' can force the manufacturer to buy the vehicle back or exchange it.
Q 05Which fruit lends its name to the rude sputtering noise also known in America as a Bronx cheer?
Raspberry
Raspberry comes from Cockney rhyming slang, where 'raspberry tart' stood for 'fart', the sound the noise imitates.
Q 06Which fruit grows in a large hanging bunch made up of tiers that growers call hands?
Banana
Banana bunches carry around nine hands of up to 20 fruits each, and the 'trunk' they hang from is really a pseudostem of tightly packed leaf stalks.
Q 07Which fruit is traditionally served with cream to spectators at the Wimbledon tennis championships?
Strawberries
Strawberries and cream are so tied to Wimbledon that fans got through 34,000 kg of the fruit, with 10,000 litres of cream, at the 2017 tournament.
Q 08In Roald Dahl's Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, gum-chewing Violet Beauregarde swells up into which giant fruit?
Blueberry
Blueberry is Violet's fate after she chews Willy Wonka's experimental three-course-meal gum, and the Oompa-Loompas roll her off to the Juicing Room.
Q 09According to the Book of Genesis, Adam and Eve covered themselves with leaves from which fruit tree?
Fig
Fig leaves became art's standard cover-up as a result, and the edible fig may be the first plant humans ever cultivated, ahead of wheat and barley.
Q 10Which tropical fruit became a symbol of wealth in 18th-century Britain, where aristocrats raised it in greenhouses?
Pineapple
Pineapple growing cost so much in equipment and labour that the fruit became a status symbol, and pineapple figures spread through architecture as emblems of hospitality.
Q 11In Swiss legend, the crossbowman William Tell is forced to shoot which fruit off his young son's head?
Apple
Apple in place, Tell could redeem his life only by hitting it in a single attempt, and he split it with a bolt from his crossbow.
Q 12Which fruit's fibrous outer husk yields coir, the fibre used for doormats, brushes and rope?
Coconut
Coconut fibre has been twisted into rope since ancient times, and the Austronesian voyagers who first domesticated the palm lashed their plank boats together with it.
Q 13The dip guacamole takes its name from Nahuatl words meaning a sauce made from which fruit?
Avocado
Avocado is the āhuacatl in āhuacamōlli, the Nahuatl name behind guacamole, which literally translates as 'avocado sauce'.
Q 21Which breakfast citrus fruit is the most studied cause of dangerous food interactions with prescription medicines?
Grapefruit
Grapefruit was unmasked by accident in 1989, when researchers testing a drug alongside alcohol used its juice to hide the taste of the ethanol.
Q 22Which citrus fruit did the Royal Navy add to sailors' rum rations, earning the British a lasting American nickname?
Lime
Lime juice in the daily grog was meant to ward off scurvy, and the nickname is thought to have begun in the 1850s as 'lime-juicer' before shrinking to 'limey'.
Q 23Which thorn-covered fruit, the 'king of fruits', is banned by some Southeast Asian hotels for its lingering odour?
Durian
Q 14Which fruit tree does young George Washington admit to cutting with his hatchet in Parson Weems's famous tale?
Cherry
Cherry tree and all, the tale is counted among Weems's exaggerated or invented anecdotes; he credited it to an unnamed elderly lady who was a distant relative of the family.
Q 15Chef Auguste Escoffier created a dessert at London's Savoy Hotel to honour soprano Nellie Melba using which fruit?
Peach
Peach Melba began as fresh peaches over vanilla ice cream in a silver dish perched on an ice sculpture of a swan, a nod to the opera Lohengrin that Melba was singing.
Q 16In the nursery rhyme, which fruit does Little Jack Horner pull out of his Christmas pie with his thumb?
Plum
Plum in hand, Jack declares 'What a good boy am I!', and the rhyme, first mentioned in the 18th century, soon became shorthand for political opportunism.
Q 17Which sweet fruit do Muslims traditionally eat first to break the daily fast during Ramadan?
Dates
Dates open the evening iftar meal, traditionally three of them with water, in emulation of the Prophet Muhammad, who broke his fast this way.
Q 18Branches of which fruit tree wreathe the world map on the United Nations flag?
Olive
Olive branches cradle a world map drawn as if looking down on the North Pole, an emblem meant to stand for all the people and countries of the world.
Q 19In the carol 'The Twelve Days of Christmas', the partridge given on the first day sits in which fruit tree?
Pear
Pear tree and partridge may be a pun: one old theory holds that 'pear tree' is a corruption of perdrix, the French word for the bird.
Q 20Which tart red fruit is harvested by flooding its beds so the loosened berries float to the surface?
Cranberry
Cranberry beds are not kept under water all year, despite a common misconception: growers flood them at harvest and corral the floating fruit into a corner.
Durian carries the scientific name Durio zibethinus, from the Italian for civet, either because it smells like the animal or because civets were baited with it.
Q 24Japanese scientists created the first seedless triploid hybrids of which large, thick-rinded summer fruit?
Watermelon
Watermelon without seeds was slow to catch on because the early hybrids lacked disease resistance, yet by 2014 it made up nearly 85% of US sales.
Q 25Legend has Queen Victoria offering a reward for a fresh specimen of which Southeast Asian 'queen of fruits'?
Mangosteen
Mangosteen earned Victoria's supposed hundred-pound bounty only in print: the tale traces to a 1930 book by fruit explorer David Fairchild, and no historical document backs it.
Q 26Marmalade is a citrus preserve today, but which fruit was it made from when England imported it in the 1500s?
Quince
Quince is marmelo in Portuguese, and marmelada, a firm, sticky, reddish paste of the fruit cooked slowly with sugar, is still made today.
Q 27Earl Grey tea is flavoured with the oil of which sour citrus fruit, grown on a large scale in Calabria?
Bergamot
Bergamot was first recorded in tea in 1824, apparently to lift low-quality leaves, and the Lord Grey of the name never travelled to China.
Q 28Which fruit is sliced, fried, flattened and fried again to make the Latin American snack tostones?
Plantain
Plantain for tostones is picked green and unripe, and the dish takes its name from the Spanish verb tostar, 'to toast'.
Q 29Which fruit tree's leaves are the sole food of the silkworm, the caterpillar behind the silk trade?
Mulberry
Mulberry growing for silkworms began in China more than 4,700 years ago, and the insect's scientific name, Bombyx mori, comes from the tree's genus, Morus.
Q 30Citrus fruit protected long-voyage sailors from scurvy because it is rich in which essential nutrient?
Vitamin C
Vitamin C was unknown when naval surgeon James Lind ran his 1747 trial, testing citrus against cider, vinegar and seawater in one of the first controlled experiments.