Nuts Trivia
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49 free Nuts trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Nuts are everywhere in the kitchen, but the facts behind them are stranger than the snack aisle lets on. Peanuts are not nuts, bitter almonds carry cyanide, Brazil nuts are faintly radioactive, and the cashew you eat grows outside its own fruit. This quiz covers the botany, history, geography and food science of nuts, from ancient Scottish hazelnut roasts to the Ferrero factory in Alba. Every answer is sourced and explained, so you learn something even when you miss.
30 of 49 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Botanically, the peanut belongs to which plant family?
Legumes
Legumes: the peanut is a cousin of peas and beans, and like them it hosts root bacteria that pull nitrogen from the air, leaving the field richer for whatever is planted next.
Q 02Peanut pods develop underground, a rare trait known by what name?
Geocarpy
Geocarpy: after pollination a stalk called a peg pushes the young pod a few inches into the soil to ripen, which is why Linnaeus named the species hypogaea, 'under the earth'.
Q 03Which US president ran his family's peanut farm before entering politics?
Jimmy Carter
Jimmy Carter: when his father died in 1953 he resigned from the Navy's nuclear submarine programme to save the family business, and he handed it to trustees before he was sworn in as president.
Q 04Which scientist promoted hundreds of peanut-based products in the American South?
George Washington Carver
George Washington Carver: his cotton-and-peanut rotations revived worn-out soil but left farmers with barns of unsold peanuts, so he set about devising some 300 uses for them.
Q 05The oldest known peanut pods, well over 7,000 years old, came from an Andean valley in which country?
Peru
Peru: the pods lay among ancient garden plots, hoes and irrigation canals in a dry valley, evidence that people in the Andes were farming far earlier than the sparse record had suggested.
Q 06Peanuts stored warm and damp can grow a mold that produces which cancer-causing toxin?
Aflatoxin
Aflatoxin: it is made by the mold Aspergillus flavus, which can take hold in the field or in storage, so every truckload of raw American peanuts is tested before it can be sold.
Q 07Which US state is by far the world's biggest almond-growing region?
California
California: its growers say they supply about 80% of the world's almonds, shipped to more than 90 countries, though the tree was first tamed in the Bronze Age Middle East.
Q 08The almond tree is a close relative of which fruit, sharing the subgenus Amygdalus?
The peach
The peach: on the tree an almond looks like a small, leathery green peach, but where we eat a peach's flesh and throw away the stone, with an almond we do the opposite.
Q 09Bitter almonds are dangerous because they can release which toxin when eaten?
Hydrogen cyanide
Hydrogen cyanide: chewing a bitter almond frees it from a compound called amygdalin, and a single mutation that switched that compound off is what made sweet almonds safe to farm.
Q 10Which paste of ground almonds and sugar is rolled out to cover cakes and moulded into sweets?
Marzipan
Marzipan: on a British Christmas cake it is the yellow layer hidden under the icing, there to give a smooth, flat base, while Sicilians paint theirs to pass for real fruit.
Q 11Each February, which insects are trucked into America's almond orchards from across the country?
Honeybees
Honeybees: almond blossom needs more cross-pollination than wind and wild insects can supply, so beekeepers haul in more than a million hives on thousands of trucks.
Q 12The cashew nut hangs below a swollen, pear-shaped accessory fruit called the cashew what?
Apple
Apple: the cashew apple is really the swollen stalk behind the nut, juicy enough to press for drinks, and in parts of Latin America people long prized it and threw the nut away.
Q 13Cashew shells contain an irritant chemically related to the toxin in which plant?
Poison ivy
Poison ivy: the two plants are botanical cousins, and in 1982 dozens of Americans came out in a poison-ivy-like rash after eating imported cashews with bits of shell left in the bag.
Q 21Which vegetable-garden favourite is notorious for wilting when planted near a black walnut tree?
Tomatoes
Tomatoes: walnut roots, leaves and husks give off juglone, a chemical that starves sensitive plants of energy and water, and it lingers in the soil for years after the tree is felled.
Q 22Which country produced about 35% of the world's walnuts in 2023?
China
China: its 2023 harvest was the world's largest, yet in North America the common walnut goes by the name English walnut.
Q 23Macadamia trees are native to which country?
Australia
Australia: Aboriginal people gathered the nuts from subtropical rainforest long before any orchard existed, yet the macadamia became a worldwide crop only within the last century.
Q 14Explorers from which country carried the cashew from South America to India in the 1500s?
Portugal
Portugal: its traders planted the tree along the coasts of India and Mozambique in the 1500s simply to hold the soil against erosion, and it ran wild before anyone valued the nut.
Q 15Which West African country, the world's biggest cocoa grower, also led the 2023 cashew harvest?
Ivory Coast
Ivory Coast: the cashew tree is native to north-east Brazil, yet the biggest harvest now comes from the far side of the Atlantic, with India next in line.
Q 16Pistachio orchards must mix which trees?
Male and female
Male and female: only the female trees bear nuts, so growers plant just enough males among them, roughly one to every ten, to keep the orchard supplied with pollen.
Q 17What does a ripe pistachio's shell do that growers deliberately bred for?
It splits open with a pop
It splits open with a pop: botanists call the split dehiscence, and it matters at market, because nuts whose shells stay shut are worth far less than ones that open themselves.
Q 18The word pistachio reached English by way of Greek and Latin from which language?
Persian
Persian: English borrowed the word twice, first from French as 'pistace' in the late Middle Ages and later, in the form used today, from Italian.
Q 19Bulk pistachios are treated as a risky cargo at sea because they can do what?
Catch fire by themselves
Catch fire by themselves: the oil in a damp, tightly packed load breaks down and gives off heat, so a cargo can smoulder into flame, which is why shippers insist on dry, well-aired holds.
Q 20The Old English name behind the word walnut literally described it as what kind of nut?
A foreign nut
A foreign nut: the tree reached the Germanic peoples from Gaul and Italy, so they gave it a name that told it apart from the hazelnuts growing wild at home.
Q 24Where were macadamias first grown as a commercial crop on a large scale?
Hawaii
Hawaii: seeds planted there in the 1880s grew into the first big orchards, and DNA tests suggest nearly all of the islands' trees descend from one small wild stand, perhaps a single tree.
Q 25Macadamia nuts are named after John Macadam, a 19th-century man of which profession?
Chemist
Chemist: Glasgow-born John Macadam had just become secretary of his adopted city's leading scientific society when the botanist Ferdinand von Mueller named the tree in his honour.
Q 26Macadamia nuts are notoriously toxic to which household pet?
Dogs
Dogs: a handful can leave one weak in the hind legs, trembling and listless within hours, and vets still don't know which compound in the nut is to blame.
Q 27Brazil nuts are famous for an unusually high amount of which mineral?
Selenium
Selenium: how much depends on the soil the tree stood in, so a single nut can supply anything from a tenth of an adult's daily need to nearly three times it.
Q 28Brazil nut trees soak up traces of which element, one of Marie Curie's discoveries?
Radium
Radium: the tree draws it from the soil along with barium, its chemical look-alike, so Brazil nuts carry far more of it than most foods do.
Q 29Which large rodent gnaws open Brazil nut capsules and buries seeds that later sprout?
The agouti
The agouti: it is said to be the only rodent able to gnaw through the woody casing, and the nuts it buries for later and never digs up are how new trees get planted.
Q 30As of 2024, which landlocked country matches Brazil as a leading source of Brazil nuts?
Bolivia
Bolivia: its Amazon forests yield almost as many nuts as Brazil's, and because the trees crop poorly in plantations, nearly every one is gathered from the wild.