Gregor Mendel Trivia
0Loading crowd target
0Loading crowd target
6correct to beat the crowd
49 free Gregor Mendel trivia questions with answers — science & nature quiz, new questions added Sep 2026.
This Gregor Mendel trivia quiz covers the Augustinian friar whose pea plants founded genetics, decades before anyone noticed. The easy questions handle the peas, the 3-to-1 ratio, dominant and recessive, the abbey and the two laws. From there it moves through the life: the struggling farm, the sister who gave up her dowry, the teaching exams he kept failing, the year under Christian Doppler in Vienna, and the trip to London that may have shaped his final experiments. The harder end covers the bishop who giggled at pea genealogies, the size of the garden, the number of plants, the paper nobody cited, the botanist who did not understand it, the three men who rediscovered it in 1900, the hawkweed that refused to cooperate, the aggressive bees, the mouse myth, the composer at his funeral, the papers his successor burned, and the statistician who said the data were too good to be true. Every answer was checked against Mendel's encyclopaedia entry before publishing and the supporting sentence is stored with each question. Our biology and famous scientists quizzes are the natural next stop.
30 of 49 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Mendel was abbot of St Thomas' Abbey in which city?
Brno
Brno: then called Brünn, its abbey was less a cloister than a college, a dozen or so scholar-friars whose main public duty was to supply teachers for the region's schools.
Q 02Which duty of a parish priest upset the young Mendel so badly that his abbot made him a teacher instead?
Visiting the sick
Visiting the sick: his abbot told the bishop that Mendel was seized by an unconquerable timidity at a sick-bed and had fallen dangerously ill himself, so he was sent to a school instead.
Q 03Born Johann, Mendel took the name Gregor on joining which religious order?
The Augustinians
The Augustinians: his physics professor, asked to pick a student for the monastery, recommended him as a young man of solid character and almost the best in his subject.
Q 04Which animals, the abbey's main source of income, had made breeding a hot topic in Mendel's homeland?
Sheep
Sheep: local breeders had formed a society decades earlier to improve their wool, and Mendel's own abbot, a member, was already asking what exactly is inherited, and how.
Q 05Mendel built his laws by tracking how many contrasting traits of the pea plant?
Seven
Seven: he spent two years testing thirty-four varieties first, and kept only traits that came in two clear-cut forms, such as tall or short, so that every plant could be scored without doubt.
Q 06When Mendel crossed pure-breeding yellow peas with green ones, what colour were the seeds of the offspring?
All yellow
All yellow: green had not been lost, only hidden, for it turned up again when these plants were bred with one another.
Q 07In the second generation of Mendel's crosses, the two seed colours appeared in what ratio?
3 to 1
3 to 1: the hidden colour came back in a quarter of the seeds, and so steady a proportion told Mendel that each parent hands on one of two separate factors at random.
Q 08What do geneticists now call the alternative versions of a hereditary factor, such as Mendel's yellow and green?
Alleles
Alleles: every plant carries two for each trait, one from each parent, which is how a character can vanish for a generation and then return.
Q 09In which language, his mother tongue, did Mendel write his famous paper on pea hybrids?
German
German: he read it to his local natural history society in 1865, and neither that audience nor the journal's readers grasped what he had found.
Q 10Mendel's paper lay neglected for roughly how long?
35 years
35 years, near enough: published in 1866, it was barely cited until 1900, when three botanists in three countries reported the same laws within two months and each acknowledged that he had got there first.
Q 11Which Dutch botanist was among the three scientists who rediscovered Mendel's laws?
Hugo de Vries
Hugo de Vries: two other botanists reported the same laws within weeks of him, and each said he had learned only late in his work that an unknown monk had got there first.
Q 12As a boy on the family farm, Mendel worked as a gardener and studied what?
Beekeeping
Beekeeping: he never gave it up, building an apiary at the monastery to cross different races of bee, and complaining as a busy abbot that he had to neglect 'my plants and my bees'.
Q 13Struggling to pay for his studies, Mendel was helped by his younger sister Theresia, who gave him what?
Her dowry
Q 21Left alone, how do pea plants normally set seed, a habit that kept Mendel's varieties pure?
By fertilising themselves
By fertilising themselves: each variety therefore bred true, and to make a cross Mendel had to fertilise every flower by hand, the most laborious part of his work.
Q 22Which Czech composer played the organ at Mendel's funeral?
Leos Janacek
Leos Janacek: he had grown up as a choirboy in the abbey's own music school, and few of the hundreds of mourners he played for knew they were burying a great scientist.
Q 23What is thought to have happened to Mendel's notes and papers soon after his death?
They were burned
Her dowry: he never forgot it, later bringing her three sons to live near him and paying for their schooling, and two of them became doctors.
Q 14By his own account, what drove Mendel into a monastery?
Money worries
Money worries: he wrote that he felt compelled to enter a station in life that would free him from 'the bitter struggle for existence', and that his circumstances decided his choice of vocation.
Q 15To which university was Mendel sent for two years after failing his teaching exam in 1850?
Vienna
Vienna: two years of physics and mathematics there shaped the way he later designed his pea crosses, but at his second try for the certificate he broke down under the strain and never qualified.
Q 16As abbot, Mendel took a paid post as deputy chairman of which kind of business?
A mortgage bank
A mortgage bank: the post paid well but kept him at a desk there for an hour or two almost every day, one of the many duties that slowly crowded out his experiments.
Q 17Which physicist taught Mendel at university in the early 1850s?
Christian Doppler
Christian Doppler: the man behind the Doppler effect taught him experimental physics, a discipline that Mendel carried into the monastery garden when he turned to peas.
Q 18To which part of the cell were Mendel's hereditary 'factors' traced soon after his work resurfaced?
The chromosomes
The chromosomes: in 1902 Walter Sutton, watching grasshopper cells divide, saw them pair up and then part as sex cells form, just as Mendel's factors were supposed to.
Q 19In summer 1862 Mendel joined a luxury group tour by chartered train to which two cities?
Paris and London
Paris and London: the goal was London's International Exhibition, a world's fair, and the friar travelled in style with a party of well-to-do tourists on what was billed as a pleasure train.
Q 20After becoming abbot, Mendel's science largely ended because of a long government dispute over what?
Taxes on religious institutions
Taxes on religious institutions: convinced the new levy was unlawful, he refused to pay it for ten years, even when the state seized the abbey's estates to collect.
They were burned: only his bound books were spared, and who gave the order is no longer clear; even the handwritten manuscript of his pea paper went missing, and came home only in 2012.
Q 24In the label F1 for the first generation of a Mendelian cross, what does the F stand for?
Filial
Filial: from the Latin for son or daughter, so F1 plants are the children of the original cross and F2 the grandchildren, the generation in which hidden traits come back.
Q 25Which word, coined in 1909, describes a plant's visible traits as opposed to its hidden hereditary make-up?
Phenotype
Phenotype: Mendel's crosses showed why the distinction matters, since two tall plants can look identical and yet breed differently, one true, the other throwing short offspring.
Q 26Which insect became the workhorse of genetics once Thomas Hunt Morgan began breeding it, within a decade of Mendel's laws resurfacing?
Fruit fly
Fruit fly: the matings in Morgan's 'Fly Room' at Columbia University turned the monk's abstract factors into things that could be mapped, and won him a Nobel Prize in 1933.
Q 27What set Mendel apart from earlier breeders?
Counting thousands of plants
Counting thousands of plants: some 28,000 over eight seasons, enough for the play of chance to even out and for a steady proportion to show through.
Q 28Which pea seeds did Mendel cross first?
Round and wrinkled
Round and wrinkled: the wrinkled kind lacks a working enzyme for making starch, the first of his traits to be traced to its gene, more than a century after he described it.
Q 29Mendel's two generalisations were the Law of Segregation and the Law of what?
Independent Assortment
Independent Assortment: he found that traits such as seed colour and plant height are handed on separately, so that a cross can shuffle old characters into combinations never seen before.
Q 30In 1902 Archibald Garrod showed that Mendel's laws, worked out in peas, also govern heredity in which species?
Humans
Humans: he noticed that alkaptonuria, a rare disorder that darkens the urine, turned up most often in the children of first cousins, just as a hidden recessive trait should.