The Liver
0Loading crowd target
0Loading crowd target
7correct to beat the crowd
40 free The Liver trivia questions with answers — science & nature quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
The liver is the body's chemical plant. It sits quietly under the ribs, handles hundreds of jobs at once, and rarely complains until something has gone badly wrong, which is why most people know far less about it than about the heart or the lungs. This quiz covers the organ from every side: where it sits and how it is built, what it makes, stores and clears from the blood, and what happens when disease, drugs or infection damage it. There are questions on hepatitis, scarring and inherited disorders, on the tests doctors use, and on the everyday habits that help or harm liver health. A few look further afield, at the liver in myth, language, cooking and the animal kingdom. It is written for curious general readers, for students revising anatomy or nursing, and for anyone who wants to test what they know about liver disease. Every answer comes with a short explanation, so a wrong guess still teaches something.
30 of 40 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which Titan of Greek myth was chained to a rock while an eagle ate his liver every day?
Prometheus
Prometheus was being punished by Zeus for stealing fire and giving it to humans; in several major versions of the myth the hero Heracles eventually kills the eagle and frees him.
Q 02Which Arctic animal's liver holds so much vitamin A that eating it can poison a person?
Polar bear
Polar bear liver has been off the menu for the Inuit for generations, and a Dutch crew learned why in 1597, falling severely ill after eating it while wintering on Novaya Zemlya.
Q 03After surgeons remove more than half of a healthy human liver, what does the remaining portion usually do?
Regrows to full size
It regrows to full size, or very nearly, with function back to normal in about six weeks, which is why a living donor can give away the larger share of the organ and recover.
Q 04For what purpose did Babylonian and Etruscan priests closely inspect the livers of sacrificed sheep?
Reading omens
Reading omens in a liver was called hepatoscopy, and a bronze model of a sheep's liver found near Piacenza, Italy, is inscribed with the names of Etruscan gods.
Q 05An overdose of which everyday painkiller is the most common cause of acute liver failure in the United States?
Acetaminophen
Acetaminophen, known as paracetamol outside North America, also prompts more calls to US poison control centers than an overdose of any other drug.
Q 06The liver is the heaviest internal organ, but which organ is the largest in the human body overall?
Skin
Skin accounts for roughly 16% of body mass, which pushes the liver, at about 1.5 kilograms, into second place among all the organs.
Q 07Which French delicacy is the liver of a duck or goose that has been enlarged by force-feeding?
Foie gras
Foie gras is protected under French law as part of the country's cultural and gastronomic heritage, and the force-feeding behind it dates back to Egypt around 2500 BC.
Q 08Which condition, named from the French word for yellow, discolors the whites of the eyes when the liver falters?
Jaundice
Jaundice shows that a yellow pigment from worn-out red blood cells is building up faster than the liver can clear it. It is common in newborns, affecting more than half in their first week.
Q 09In which part of the abdomen, just below the diaphragm and behind the lower ribs, does the human liver sit?
Upper right
Upper right places the liver to the right of the stomach, and pain in that spot can signal that the organ is inflamed and stretching its outer capsule.
Q 10Which term, coined by the inventor of the stethoscope from a Greek color word, names late-stage scarring of the liver?
Cirrhosis
Cirrhosis was named by René Laennec, the French doctor who invented the stethoscope, after the Greek kirrhos, describing the yellowish color of a diseased liver.
Q 11Which medical specialty treats diseases of the liver, gallbladder, pancreas, and bile ducts?
Hepatology
Hepatology was long treated as a branch of gastroenterology, but the field has grown so fast that some countries now have doctors who specialize in it alone.
Q 12Which Scottish national dish mixes a sheep's heart, liver, and lungs with oatmeal, onion, and spices?
Haggis
Haggis was traditionally boiled inside the animal's stomach, and it owes its national status to Robert Burns, who wrote a poem addressed to one in 1786.
Q 13Liver spots, the flat brown patches common on aging hands and faces, are actually caused by years of what?
Sun exposure
Q 21In which form does the liver store spare glucose, holding roughly a hundred grams ready to release between meals?
Glycogen
Glycogen from the liver keeps blood sugar steady during a fast, feeding the nervous system above all, while the glycogen in muscles is kept for the muscles' own use.
Q 22The liver converts toxic ammonia from protein breakdown into which safer compound, later flushed out by the kidneys?
Urea
Urea leaves the liver in the bloodstream and is filtered out by the kidneys into urine; when a failing liver falls behind, ammonia builds up in the blood instead.
Q 23Which protein made by the liver is the most abundant in blood plasma, making up about half the total?
Albumin
Sun exposure, not the liver, is to blame: the spots were once wrongly put down to liver trouble and kept the name, though all they share with the organ is a brownish color.
Q 14Which mushroom, blamed for most fatal mushroom poisonings worldwide, kills mainly by destroying the liver?
Death cap
The death cap may have killed the Roman emperor Claudius, and its main toxin hits the liver hardest because that is the first organ a poison reaches after leaving the gut.
Q 15Hepatitis A and hepatitis B can both be prevented by what, which still does not exist for hepatitis C?
A vaccine
A vaccine protects against hepatitis A and B, and the hepatitis B shot was the first able to prevent a cancer; hepatitis C has none, but tablets now cure over 95% of chronic cases.
Q 16Regular consumption of which everyday drink is linked by cancer research bodies to a lower risk of liver cancer?
Coffee
Coffee may protect the liver whether or not it contains caffeine: regular drinking is tied to a lower risk of several other liver diseases too.
Q 17The insult lily-livered, first recorded in Shakespeare's plays, accuses a person of which failing?
Cowardice
Cowardice was once seen in the liver itself: a pale, bloodless one, white as a lily, was taken as the mark of a person without spirit, where a healthy liver is dark reddish-brown.
Q 18Which widely used drug does the liver convert first into toxic acetaldehyde and then into harmless acetate?
Alcohol
Alcohol leaves the bloodstream at a roughly constant rate, unlike most drugs, because a single standard drink is nearly enough to saturate the liver's capacity to process it.
Q 19The liver makes fibrinogen and prothrombin, two proteins that are essential to which life-saving process?
Clotting
Clotting depends so heavily on the liver that a failing liver cannot make enough of these factors, which raises the risk of serious bleeding.
Q 20Which pigment, made when old red blood cells are broken down, does the liver remove from the blood?
Bilirubin
Bilirubin does not go to waste: in the colon it is converted into the compounds that give feces their brown color and urine its straw-yellow tint.
Albumin keeps fluid from leaking out of the blood vessels and carries hormones and many drugs around the body; doctors measure it as a cheap, easy check on how well the liver is working.
Q 24Which vessel delivers about three-quarters of the liver's blood, carrying it straight from the intestines and spleen?
Portal vein
The portal vein gives the liver first call on everything absorbed from the gut, nutrients and toxins alike, before that blood reaches the rest of the body.
Q 25What are the main working cells of the liver, which make up about 80 percent of its mass, called?
Hepatocytes
Hepatocytes handle most of the liver's chemistry, from making bile and blood proteins to storing sugar, and every lobule of the organ holds millions of them.
Q 26A shark's huge, oil-filled liver keeps it buoyant, doing the job of which organ found in most bony fish?
Swim bladder
The swim bladder is a gas-filled sac that sharks lack; they rely instead on a liver full of light oil and on a skeleton of cartilage, about half as dense as bone.
Q 27A failing liver lets ammonia and other toxins build up in the blood, mainly disturbing which organ?
Brain
The brain suffers because ammonia the liver would normally clear reaches it instead, bringing confusion, personality changes and, at worst, coma. Doctors call the condition hepatic encephalopathy.
Q 28The liver and intestines make most of the body's supply of which waxy substance, vital to every cell membrane?
Cholesterol
Cholesterol is largely home-made: about 80% of the body's daily production takes place in the liver and intestines, and the liver sends some of it out again in bile.
Q 29MASLD, the world's most common liver disorder, is defined by a build-up of what inside the liver's cells?
Fat
Fat in more than 5% of liver cells defines the condition, which usually causes no symptoms and is often found only by chance on a routine blood test or scan.
Q 30In Wilson's disease, the liver cannot shed which metal, which can leave brown rings around the cornea of the eye?
Copper
Copper normally leaves the body in bile, but in this inherited condition a faulty transport protein traps it in the liver, and the rings in the eye are deposits of the metal.