50 free Nuts trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Aug 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 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Botanically, the peanut belongs to which plant family?
Legumes
Peanuts grow like peas and beans, not like tree nuts. They even fix nitrogen in the soil through bacteria in their root nodules.
Q 02Peanut pods develop underground, a rare trait known by what name?
Geocarpy
After pollination a stalk called a peg grows down into the soil, and the pod forms there. Linnaeus named the species hypogaea, Greek for under the earth.
Q 03Which company made peanut butter famous by selling it at the 1904 St. Louis World's Fair?
Beech-Nut
Peanut butter was first manufactured in Canada under an 1884 US patent held by Marcellus Gilmore Edson of Montreal.
Q 04Which US president was a peanut farmer from Sumter County, Georgia?
Jimmy Carter
Georgia leads the nation in peanut production with about 49 percent of the country's peanut acreage and output.
Q 05Which scientist promoted hundreds of peanut-based products in the American South?
George Washington Carver
He pushed peanuts as a rotation crop for soils exhausted by cotton, and his product list ran from cosmetics to paints to nitroglycerin.
Q 06The oldest known peanut pods, about 7,600 years old, were found in which country?
Peru
Dry conditions there preserve organic material. The Moche and other pre-Columbian cultures depicted peanuts in their art.
Q 07Which mold can contaminate drought-stressed peanuts and produce carcinogenic aflatoxins?
Aspergillus flavus
The USDA tests every truckload of raw peanuts; any lot over 15 parts per billion is destroyed or diverted to oil, where the mold can be removed.
Q 08Which US state produces roughly 80% of the world's almond supply?
California
Heavy water and pesticide demands have raised sustainability concerns there, and repeated droughts have pushed some growers out of the industry.
Q 09The almond tree is a close relative of which fruit, sharing the subgenus Amygdalus?
The peach
An almond fruit is a drupe with a hull and a hard shell around the seed, so the almond you eat is not a true nut.
Q 10Bitter almonds are dangerous because they can release which toxin when eaten?
Hydrogen cyanide
About 50 bitter almonds could be lethal for an adult, and as few as 5 to 10 for a child. All almonds sold as food in the US are sweet cultivars.
Q 11Which sweet confection made from ground almonds features prominently in desserts?
Marzipan
Almonds were among the earliest domesticated fruit trees because quality trees could be grown straight from seed, without cuttings or suckers.
Q 12Which country led world almond production in 2024 with about 51% of the total?
United States
Two southern-hemisphere and Mediterranean growers were the secondary producers, and one of them posted a record A$1.3 billion crop value in 2024-25.
Q 13The cashew nut hangs below a swollen, pear-shaped accessory fruit called the cashew what?
Apple
That colourful structure is an accessory fruit that develops from the flower stalk. The kidney-shaped drupe hanging below it is the true fruit.
Q 21The Persian or English walnut, Juglans regia, originally comes from which country?
Iran
The black walnut is native to eastern North America, and the Japanese walnut is also known as the heartnut.
Q 22Which compound in walnut husks, at 2 to 4% fresh weight, stains hands and irritates skin?
Juglone
Walnut trees are also notoriously late to leaf out, often not until more than halfway through spring.
Q 23Which country produced about 35% of the world's walnuts in 2023?
China
Total production was four million tonnes in shell. Collectors there also prize large carved wenwan walnuts, rotated in the hand as a plaything.
Q 14Cashew shells contain an irritant chemically related to the toxin in which plant?
Poison ivy
The shell resin can cause contact dermatitis, which is why cashews are essentially never sold in the shell to consumers.
Q 15Explorers from which country carried the cashew from South America to India in the 1500s?
Portugal
The tree is native to tropical South America, yet by 2023 the biggest harvests were in West Africa and South Asia.
Q 16Which African country led the 2023 global cashew harvest alongside India?
Ivory Coast
Global output was 3.9 million tons that year. Dwarf cultivars around 6 metres tall are the most profitable because they mature sooner.
Q 17A pistachio tree may live up to how many years?
300
Orchard trees take 7 to 10 years to reach significant production, and the plants are dioecious, with separate male and female trees.
Q 18What happens to a ripe pistachio shell that humans deliberately selected for?
It splits open with a pop
Botanists call the splitting dehiscence. The shell also shifts from green to an autumnal yellow-red as the fruit ripens.
Q 19The word pistachio ultimately derives from a Middle Persian word meaning what?
Pestle
The trail runs through Greek pistákion, Latin, Italian pistacchio and Old French before reaching English. The same root gives us pesto.
Q 20Which three countries produced about 87% of the world's pistachios in 2024?
United States, Iran and Turkey
World output was about 1.4 million tonnes. Pistachio is a desert plant that tolerates salty soil and can survive from -10 to 48 degrees Celsius.
Q 24Macadamia trees are native to which country?
Australia
It is the only widely grown food plant that is native there, and it was an important bushfood for Aboriginal peoples long before orchards.
Q 25Which place was the world's largest macadamia producer for more than a century?
Hawaii
Seeds were first imported there in 1882 by William H. Purvis. South Africa has been the largest producer since the 2010s.
Q 26The genus Macadamia was named in 1857 in honour of John Macadam, who was what?
A Scottish-Australian chemist
Botanist Ferdinand von Mueller did the naming. Macadam was also a medical teacher and politician in Victoria.
Q 27A macadamia shell has mechanical properties similar to which metal?
Aluminum
Cracking one takes roughly 2,000 newtons of force, and the shell is about five times harder than a hazelnut shell.
Q 28Brazil nuts are famous for an unusually high amount of which mineral?
Selenium
A single 28-gram serving of six to eight nuts averages about ten times the daily value, though batches vary widely.
Q 29Brazil nuts can hold traces of which radioactive element, concentrated by the roots?
Radium
A kilogram may register 40 to 260 becquerels. The dose is small, but it is higher than in common foods.
Q 30Which large rodent gnaws open Brazil nut capsules and buries seeds that later sprout?
The agouti
Buried seeds can lie dormant for years until a tree falls and sunlight reaches the forest floor.