Heart
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7correct to beat the crowd
This heart quiz has 110 free questions with answers and covers the organ from every angle: how it is built (chambers, valves, the septum, the arteries that feed it), how it works (the natural pacemaker, systole and diastole, the lub-dub of the valves, how much blood it moves in a day), and how it goes wrong and gets fixed (blood pressure numbers, cholesterol, heart attacks versus cardiac arrest, stroke, CPR and defibrillators, bypasses, pacemakers and the first transplant). There is a stretch of medical history too, from William Harvey and the first stethoscope to the doctor who threaded a catheter into his own heart, and a few detours into animal hearts: the whale with the biggest, the octopus with three, the hummingbird with the fastest. Around a third of the questions suit a school health class or a family table; the rest climb to the level of a nursing student or a keen pub-quiz team. Every answer has been checked against Wikipedia and medical reference pages, and each question shows its source once you have answered, so it is safe to use for a heart-month event, a classroom or a quiz night.
30 of 110 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01How many chambers does the human heart have?
Four
Four. A wall down the middle makes the heart two pumps in one: one half sends used blood to the lungs while the other sends the refreshed blood round the body.
Q 02What are the two upper chambers of the heart called?
Atria
Atria. The name is Latin for an entrance hall, which is roughly what they are: blood arriving at the heart collects there before being passed down to the pumping chambers below.
Q 03An adult's heart is usually described as about the size of which part of its owner's body?
Fist
Fist. It weighs only about 300 grams, though years of hard endurance training can enlarge it, a normal change that doctors regularly see in athletes.
Q 04A resting adult heart rate above 100 beats a minute is known by which medical term?
Tachycardia
Tachycardia. A healthy adult heart at rest beats 60 to 100 times a minute, and fitness pulls the figure down: a well-trained athlete's can idle at 40 to 60.
Q 05Which structure acts as the heart's own natural pacemaker?
The sinoatrial node
The sinoatrial node. Left to itself it would fire about 100 times a minute, but the nervous system acts as a brake and holds a resting heart to 60 to 80 beats.
Q 06Which chamber of the heart has by far the thickest muscular wall?
Left ventricle
Left ventricle. The right ventricle only has to push blood next door to the lungs, while the left must drive it out to the toes and back, and it builds the muscle to match.
Q 07What is the name of the sac that surrounds the heart?
Pericardium
Pericardium. When it becomes inflamed, the sharp pain that follows has a telltale quirk: it eases when the patient sits up and leans forward.
Q 08Which wall of muscle separates the heart's two lower pumping chambers from each other?
The interventricular septum
The interventricular septum. A hole in it is one of the most common heart defects babies are born with, and small ones often close on their own as the heart grows.
Q 09The myocardium, the middle layer of the heart wall, is made of which type of tissue?
Involuntary striated muscle
Involuntary striated muscle. It is striped like the muscle of your arm but runs without conscious control, and its cells are packed with mitochondria that keep it supplied with energy around the clock.
Q 10Which heart valve sits between the right atrium and the right ventricle?
Tricuspid
Tricuspid. Its three flaps are tied by fine cords to small muscles in the ventricle wall, which tighten with every beat to stop the valve being blown inside out.
Q 11The heart's mitral valve, named for its likeness to a bishop's mitre, also goes by which name?
Bicuspid
Bicuspid. It has two flaps where the heart's other valves have three, and when it leaks, blood slips backwards with every beat and can leave its owner short of breath.
Q 12Roughly how soon after conception does a human embryo's heart start to beat?
About 3 weeks
About 3 weeks. Doctors count a pregnancy from the last period, which makes that week five, and the heart at that point is still a single tube, weeks away from forming its chambers.
Q 13Which parasympathetic nerve acts to slow the heart rate?
The vagus nerve
Q 21On an ECG trace, the QRS complex represents the electrical depolarization of which part of the heart?
The ventricles
The ventricles. They hold far more muscle than the atria, so their firing draws the tallest spike on the trace, while the atria manage only the small P wave just before it.
Q 22On whom did Werner Forssmann perform the first human cardiac catheterization in 1929?
Himself
Himself. Forbidden by his boss to try it, he slid a catheter up a vein in his arm, walked to the X-ray room to have it photographed inside his heart, and shared a Nobel Prize in 1956.
Q 23In which city did Christiaan Barnard perform the first human heart transplant in 1967?
Cape Town
The vagus nerve. Its name is Latin for wandering, after its long route from the skull to the gut, and pain or strong emotion can fire it hard enough to slow the heart and cause a faint.
Q 14The amount of blood the heart pumps each minute, about five litres at rest, is known as what?
Cardiac output
Cardiac output. Five litres is roughly all the blood an adult has, so a resting heart turns over the body's entire supply about once a minute.
Q 15What is the largest artery in the human body, carrying blood out of the heart's main pumping chamber?
The aorta
The aorta. Its elastic wall stretches with each beat and springs back while the heart relaxes, which keeps blood moving between beats.
Q 16The 'lub' of the heart's 'lub-dub' sound is caused by the closing of which pair?
The mitral and tricuspid valves
The mitral and tricuspid valves. They snap shut as the ventricles start to squeeze, and the 'dub' that follows is the aortic and pulmonary valves closing once the squeeze is over.
Q 17A heart murmur is a sound produced by what?
Turbulent blood flow
Turbulent blood flow. The rough flow is sometimes blood forcing its way through a leaky or narrowed valve, but many murmurs, especially in children, are harmless.
Q 18Which instrument did the French doctor René Laennec first improvise from a rolled sheet of paper?
Stethoscope
Stethoscope. Too embarrassed to press his ear to a young woman's chest, Laennec listened through the paper tube instead, heard her heart more clearly than ever and went on to build a wooden version.
Q 19Which English physician first fully described blood circulation in his 1628 book De Motu Cordis?
William Harvey
William Harvey. He worked out how much blood the heart pumps in half an hour and showed the liver could never make that much, so the same blood had to be going round and round.
Q 20Willem Einthoven won the 1924 Nobel Prize in Medicine for his work on which heart test?
The electrocardiogram
The electrocardiogram. His first recording machine weighed some 270 kilograms, and the letters he gave the five deflections of the trace, P, Q, R, S and T, are still used today.
Cape Town. His patient, Louis Washkansky, lived only 18 days, and Barnard had beaten better-prepared American teams to the operation using a technique two of their surgeons had worked out on dogs.
Q 24At which California university did Norman Shumway perform the first adult heart transplant in the United States?
Stanford
Stanford. Shumway had spent eight years perfecting the operation on dogs, and when early patients died and other American surgeons gave up, his team carried on almost alone for a decade.
Q 25What made heart transplants far more common in the 1980s?
Anti-rejection drugs
Anti-rejection drugs. Cyclosporine, a compound isolated from a soil fungus, curbed the immune system's attack on the new heart, and the number of transplants climbed quickly once it arrived.
Q 26Which heart device was first implanted in a patient in Sweden in 1958?
Pacemaker
Pacemaker. The first unit failed within hours, yet the patient, Arne Larsson, went on to wear 26 of them and died in 2001 aged 86, having outlived both his surgeon and the engineer who built it.
Q 27In 1982 Barney Clark became the first person given a permanent what?
Artificial heart
Artificial heart. Clark did not qualify for a donor heart, so the Jarvik-7 was meant to be permanent, and he lived 112 days tethered by air hoses to its bulky drive console.
Q 28In a coronary bypass, a vein used as the graft is usually taken from which part of the body?
The leg
The leg. Surgeons lift out the great saphenous vein, the longest in the body, through a cut between ankle and groin, then stitch it in as a detour around the blocked artery.
Q 29Cardiovascular disease causes roughly what share of all deaths worldwide?
About 1 in 3
About 1 in 3. That is close to 20 million deaths a year, 85% of them heart attacks and strokes, and the World Health Organization says most could be prevented.
Q 30Which is the only continent where cardiovascular disease is NOT the leading cause of death?
Africa
Infectious diseases still claim more lives there, though heart disease is climbing fast as diets and cities change.