Kiwi Fruit
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40 free Kiwi Fruit trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
The kiwi fruit is a small brown oddity with a surprisingly big story. It began as a wild plant in the mountains of China, crossed the sea to New Zealand as a few seeds in a traveller's luggage, and gained its famous name only when exporters needed something catchier to sell abroad. This quiz turns the best kiwi fruit fun facts into questions: where the fruit comes from, who named it, why growers find it so tricky to raise, what gives the flesh its colour, and the odd things it does in the kitchen. You will also meet its smaller, hardier cousins and the people who turned a garden curiosity into a global crop. It is pitched at curious eaters rather than botanists. Every answer comes with a short explanation, so you will leave with a few facts worth repeating the next time someone slices one open.
30 of 40 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Until a 1959 rebrand, kiwifruit was sold under a name pairing the word Chinese with which other fruit?
Gooseberry
Gooseberry is the flavour early tasters are said to have been reminded of, and the name Chinese gooseberry stuck for decades even though the two plants are unrelated.
Q 02Raw kiwifruit stops which common setting agent from working, because of an enzyme in the fruit?
Gelatine
Gelatine stays runny when raw kiwifruit is added, and that is how the enzyme was found: in 1959 a chemist looked into why kiwifruit jellies would not set.
Q 03Which animals are so drawn to the smell of hardy kiwi plants that they dig up the roots?
Cats
Cats are lured by a catnip-like smell the plant gives off, and they have been known to destroy young hardy kiwis while hunting for its source.
Q 04Why will a single kiwifruit plant grown alone in a garden almost never produce any fruit?
Plants are male or female
Plants are male or female in almost all kiwifruit, so orchards mix the two, with roughly one male for every five to eight fruit-bearing females.
Q 05Which nutrient is green kiwifruit richest in, with 100 grams supplying most or all of a day's recommended value?
Vitamin C
Vitamin C is the kiwifruit's headline nutrient, and gold varieties carry even more of it than green ones, well over a day's value in 100 grams.
Q 06Which meringue dessert, claimed by both Australia and New Zealand, is often topped with sliced kiwifruit?
Pavlova
Pavlova takes its name from the Russian ballerina Anna Pavlova, who toured both countries in the 1920s, and the two still dispute who made it first.
Q 07A firm kiwifruit ripens faster in a paper bag with a banana, which gives off which ripening gas?
Ethylene
Ethylene is a plant hormone that ripe fruit releases, which is also why a ripe kiwifruit keeps best when stored well away from the fruit bowl.
Q 08Which part of a fuzzy green kiwifruit do most people throw away, although it is perfectly safe to eat?
The skin
The skin is tart but edible, and it is the fuzzy texture that puts people off: smoother gold kiwifruit are far easier to eat unpeeled.
Q 09Kiwifruit's enzyme actinidin breaks down protein, making the fruit commercially useful for which kitchen job?
Tenderising meat
Tenderising meat is the enzyme's commercial use, and the same action makes raw kiwifruit a poor match for milk desserts, because it digests milk proteins too.
Q 10Chinese shoppers often call kiwifruit qiyiguo, a sound-alike name borrowed back from which language?
English
English handed the fruit back to China under a new name: qiyiguo imitates the sound of the word kiwi, and its characters can be read as strange fruit.
Q 11Kiwifruit grows on which kind of plant, which orchards train over sturdy pergolas or T-bar frames?
A woody vine
A woody vine bears the fruit, and the pergola and T-bar supports that growers now use around the globe were both designed in New Zealand.
Q 12American servicemen stationed in New Zealand acquired a taste for kiwifruit during which conflict?
World War II
World War II made the fruit's name twice over: the troops spread the taste, and in 1959 exporters chose a new name they hoped those veterans would warm to.
Q 13Which US state took New Zealand's first American kiwifruit shipments in the 1950s and now farms the fruit itself?
California
Q 21The Chinese name mihoutao calls kiwifruit the peach of which mountain animal, said to feast on it?
Macaque
Macaque peach is the literal meaning, and a 12th-century Chinese herbal noted that monkeys ate the wild fruit along mountain paths.
Q 22Which green kiwifruit variety, named after the Auckland nurseryman who raised it, became the worldwide standard?
Hayward
Hayward was raised in the 1920s by nurseryman Hayward Wright, and by 1975 it was the only kiwifruit variety New Zealand exported.
Q 23Isabel Fraser, who brought the first kiwifruit seeds to New Zealand from China, held which job?
School principal
School principal Isabel Fraser collected the seeds while visiting her sister, a missionary teacher, and a Whanganui grower raised the first plants from them.
California was the gateway: an importer there asked for a catchier name, and local orchardists who planted the crop helped the new word catch on.
Q 14Which European country overtook New Zealand around 1990 to become the world's biggest kiwifruit producer?
Italy
Italy planted the very variety New Zealand had bred, and when more countries joined in, the world price of kiwifruit crashed in 1992.
Q 15Honey bees soon lose interest in kiwifruit flowers because the blossoms produce none of what?
Nectar
Nectar is missing from the flowers, so growers pack orchards with about eight hives per hectare until the bees have little else to visit.
Q 16Ripe kiwifruit flesh stays bright green thanks to which pigment, one rarely found in other ripe fruit?
Chlorophyll
Chlorophyll, the same pigment that colours leaves, is rarely found in ripe fruit, which makes a sliced kiwifruit one of the greenest things in the fruit bowl.
Q 17Hardy kiwis, hairless relatives of the kiwifruit that are eaten whole, are roughly the size of which fruit?
Grape
Grape is the usual comparison: hardy kiwis are sold by the punnet as kiwi berries, and the plants shrug off winters far colder than ordinary kiwifruit can stand.
Q 18Under which brand name does a grower-owned company sell New Zealand's kiwifruit around the globe?
Zespri
Zespri grew out of a national marketing board that was given a monopoly on almost all of the country's kiwifruit exports.
Q 19In traditional China, kiwifruit was regarded less as a treat than as what for growing children?
A medicine
A medicine, or tonic, is how the fruit was mainly regarded: it was given to children to help them grow and to women recovering from childbirth.
Q 20Which allergy, common among health workers, often brings reactions to kiwifruit, banana and avocado too?
Latex
Latex allergy often comes with reactions to certain fruits, a link doctors call latex-fruit syndrome, and kiwifruit is among the four most often blamed.
Q 24Exporters coined the word kiwifruit in 1959 by modelling it on the name of which other fruit?
Passionfruit
Passionfruit was the pattern Jack Turner had in mind when he bolted kiwi, a byword for New Zealand, onto the word fruit.
Q 25Psa, the disease that devastated New Zealand's gold kiwifruit from 2010, is caused by what kind of organism?
A bacterium
A bacterium called Pseudomonas syringae causes it; the outbreak wiped out the first gold variety and pushed growers to switch to a tougher replacement.
Q 26Hongyang, a Chinese kiwifruit raised in Sichuan from the seed of wild plants, is prized for flesh of which colour?
Red
Red kiwifruit began with Hongyang, China's first commercial variety of the colour, and by 2020 it was the most widely grown kiwifruit in the country.
Q 27Which tourist attractions in the Iya Valley on Shikoku are woven from several tons of hardy kiwi stems?
Bridges
Bridges of woven hardy kiwi span the Iya River, the best known about 45 metres long, and the stems have to be replaced every three years.
Q 28Kiwifruit belongs to the plant order Ericales, which makes it a distant relative of which popular drink crop?
Tea
Tea sits in the same order as kiwifruit, alongside blueberries, cranberries, persimmons and Brazil nuts.
Q 29Kiwifruit seed oil is mostly alpha-linolenic acid, a fat that belongs to which well-known family?
Omega-3
Omega-3 fats are more often linked with oily fish, but alpha-linolenic acid is the plant form, and it makes up about 62% of the oil in kiwifruit seeds.
Q 30How is commercial kiwifruit harvested, even in orchards that yield many tonnes from every hectare?
Picked by hand
Picked by hand is still the rule: pickers fill bags that are emptied into large wooden bins, and most of New Zealand's crop comes off in May.