Pesticides
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40 free Pesticides trivia questions with answers — science & nature quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Pesticides have one of the strangest back stories in science. The chemicals that guard crops and kitchens have also won a Nobel Prize, launched a household-name company, started a protest movement and, more than once, come out of a weapons lab. This quiz turns the best pesticide fun facts into questions: where famous sprays got their names, which plants make their own insect killers, how bug control shaped wars and laws, and what went wrong when people released animals to do the job instead. It suits gardeners, farmers, science students and anyone who likes a surprising fact. Every question comes with a short explanation, so you leave knowing the story behind the answer.
30 of 40 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which major US airline began as Huff Daland Dusters, a crop-dusting outfit that fought boll weevils?
Delta
Delta grew out of the world's first aerial crop-dusting company and kept a dusting division until 1966.
Q 02Which children's author spent more than a decade drawing cartoon ads for Flit, a common bug spray?
Dr. Seuss
Dr. Seuss said he landed the Flit job after an advertising executive's wife spotted one of his cartoons at a hairdresser's.
Q 03Which rat poison, named after a Wisconsin research foundation, is also prescribed as a blood thinner?
Warfarin
Warfarin went on sale as a rat poison in 1948 before doctors adopted it, and President Eisenhower took it after his 1955 heart attack.
Q 04Which fungicide began as a bitter spray to stop passersby eating roadside grapes in French vineyards?
Bordeaux mixture
Bordeaux mixture, a blend of copper sulfate and lime, caught a botany professor's eye when the sprayed roadside vines stayed free of mildew.
Q 05Which Rachel Carson book turned Americans against DDT and helped launch the environmental movement?
Silent Spring
Silent Spring drew fierce opposition from chemical companies, yet it swayed public opinion and led to a US ban on DDT in farming.
Q 06Which Indian city suffered the world's worst industrial disaster when a pesticide plant leaked gas in 1984?
Bhopal
Bhopal was home to a Union Carbide plant that made the insecticide Sevin; the gas that escaped, methyl isocyanate, was an ingredient in it.
Q 07Which defoliant mix did US aircraft spray over Vietnam in Operation Ranch Hand to strip away jungle cover?
Agent Orange
Agent Orange was named for the orange identifying stripe on the 55-gallon drums it was stored in.
Q 08In 1960, after years of DDT spraying in Borneo, the RAF parachuted in crates of which animals to fight rats?
Cats
Cats were flown in from Singapore; one much-repeated theory says insecticide spraying had killed off the local ones, though that was never confirmed.
Q 09DEET, the active ingredient in many bug sprays, was developed in the 1940s for which organization?
The US Army
The US Army wanted protection after the jungle warfare of World War II; DEET was first tested as a farm insecticide and reached civilians in 1957.
Q 10Which household container first proved itself in World War II as a soldiers' 'bug bomb' against mosquitoes?
The aerosol can
The aerosol can let troops in the Pacific spray insecticide inside tents and airplanes, and the two men credited with the modern design worked for a US government insect bureau.
Q 11DDT thinned the eggshells of eagles and ospreys by cutting the supply of which mineral to the shell gland?
Calcium
Calcium transport into the shell gland is cut by DDE, DDT's breakdown product, so affected raptors laid thin-shelled eggs that often cracked before hatching.
Q 12Pyrethrum, a natural insecticide, is made from the dried flower heads of which garden plant?
Chrysanthemum
Chrysanthemum flowers of the Dalmatian species, named for a stretch of the Balkan coast, are dried and ground to make the powder.
Q 13Which type of pesticide is the most common worldwide, accounting for about half of all pesticide use?
Herbicides
Herbicides, the weedkillers, lead every other kind; the first big synthetic one, 2,4-D, arrived in the 1940s alongside DDT.
Q 21Chili powder is added to some seed mixes to deter rodents because which animals cannot feel the burn of capsaicin?
Birds
Birds lack the heat response that mammals have to capsaicin, which suits chili plants: the seeds pass through them intact and sprout elsewhere.
Q 22Which animal, released in Queensland in 1935 to eat crop-destroying beetles, became a pest across Australia?
Cane toad
Cane toad releases followed apparent successes in Puerto Rico and Hawaii, but in Australia the cure turned into a pest of its own.
Q 23Molluscicides are pesticides scattered as pellets in gardens to kill which crop-eating pests?
Slugs and snails
Slugs and snails are gastropod mollusks, which is why the same products are also sold as snail bait and slug pellets.
Q 14The word pesticide joins the Latin 'caedere', meaning to kill, with 'pestis', a Latin word meaning what?
Plague
Plague, or deadly disease, was the meaning of pestis in Latin, the same root that gives English the word pestilence.
Q 15The microbe behind the insecticide spinosad was found in soil from a disused still that once made which spirit?
Rum
Rum had been made at the idle sugar mill in the Virgin Islands where the soil sample was collected.
Q 16Glyphosate, a widely used weedkiller, was first sold by Monsanto in 1974 under which brand name?
Roundup
Roundup took off after Monsanto engineered crops that survive it, letting farmers spray whole fields and kill only the weeds.
Q 17Which country is the world's biggest user of the poison 1080, dropped from aircraft to kill possums?
New Zealand
New Zealand has no native ground-dwelling mammals, so every possum the bait is aimed at descends from animals brought in by people.
Q 18Which US agency, created in 1970, took over pesticide regulation from the Department of Agriculture?
EPA
The EPA opened in December 1970 and within two years had cancelled most uses of DDT.
Q 19Chlordane was used in some 30 million American homes before a 1988 ban, to protect them from which pests?
Termites
Termites were the one target left after regulators banned every other use of chlordane in 1983, five years before the final ban.
Q 20A global treaty restricting DDT still allows spraying against the mosquitoes that carry which disease?
Malaria
Malaria control is the reason the Stockholm Convention restricts DDT instead of banning it; the treaty outlawed nine of its 'dirty dozen' chemicals outright.
Q 24Which nerve agent did German chemists discover in 1938 while trying to create stronger pesticides?
Sarin
Sarin was named in honor of its discoverers, led by Gerhard Schrader, whose pesticide research had already produced the nerve agent tabun.
Q 25Bt, a caterpillar-killing pesticide allowed in organic farming, is made from which kind of living thing?
A bacterium
A bacterium, Bacillus thuringiensis, is named for the German region of Thuringia, where it was found killing flour moth caterpillars.
Q 26Which arsenic-laced pigment, loved by 19th-century painters, became the first widely used chemical insecticide?
Paris green
Paris green moved from palettes to potato fields in 1867, when farmers in Illinois and Indiana found it killed the Colorado potato beetle.
Q 27Which drug reached US buyers laced with the weedkiller paraquat after Mexican fields were sprayed in the 1970s?
Marijuana
Marijuana fields were sprayed from helicopters the US sent to Mexico, and the tainted crop set off a public debate about the program.
Q 28Rotenone, an insecticide from crushed plant roots, was traditionally used by Indigenous peoples to catch what?
Fish
Fish rise to the surface when the crushed plants are stirred into the water, because rotenone interferes with their cellular respiration.
Q 29Which crop engineered by Monsanto to survive glyphosate spraying went on sale to American farmers in 1996?
Soybeans
Soybeans reached American farmers first, with corn following in 1998, and the trait let them spray weedkiller straight over a growing crop.
Q 30Swiss chemist Paul Müller won the 1948 Nobel Prize in which field for discovering that DDT kills insects?
Medicine
Medicine, not chemistry: DDT had first been made back in 1874, but its power to kill insects went unnoticed until Müller's work in 1939.