Sense of Taste
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50 free Sense of Taste trivia questions with answers — science & nature quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Taste feels like the simplest of the senses, yet much of what most of us were taught about it turns out to be wrong or incomplete. The tongue is only part of the story: what you experience when you eat depends on chemistry, genetics, temperature, sound and even the altitude you happen to be dining at. This quiz collects the most surprising facts about the sense of taste. It covers how taste buds and their receptors work, the basic tastes and the scientists who identified them, sweeteners discovered by accident, foods that trick the mouth, and animals whose sense of taste is far stranger than ours. The questions suit curious adults, students revising the senses in biology, and anyone who has ever wondered why a favourite food tastes awful to somebody else. Every answer comes with a short explanation, so you will leave with a few facts worth repeating at dinner.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which popular household pets cannot taste sweetness at all because a gene for their sweet receptor is broken?
Cats
Cats cannot detect sweetness because the gene T1R2 has decayed into a non-working pseudogene. Vampire bats share the same loss.
Q 02Which West African fruit makes lemons and other sour foods taste sweet for a while after it is chewed?
Miracle berry
Miracle berry contains miraculin, a molecule that binds to the taste buds and makes sour foods register as sweet. A European explorer saw West Africans chewing it before meals in 1725.
Q 03Which leafy herb tastes like soap to some people because of variations in an odour-receptor gene called OR6A2?
Cilantro
Cilantro, the leaf of the coriander plant, tastes soapy or rotten to people whose OR6A2 receptor is highly sensitive to the aldehydes in the leaves.
Q 04Which insects taste a leaf with sensors on their feet before deciding whether to lay eggs on it?
Butterflies
Butterflies carry contact chemoreceptors on their feet, so a female can check that a leaf will feed her caterpillars before she lays eggs on it.
Q 05Which drink is a favourite of airline passengers, perhaps because loud, pressurised cabins change how things taste?
Tomato juice
Tomato juice is a popular order in the air, and a small study by Yan and Dando hints that cabin noise and pressure heighten the perception of savoury flavours.
Q 06Which games console has game cartridges coated in an intensely bitter chemical to stop young children swallowing them?
Nintendo Switch
Nintendo Switch game cards are coated in denatonium benzoate, the bittering agent that is also added to antifreeze and to preparations that deter nail biting.
Q 07Which ice cream brand's famously big chunks arose because a co-founder who cannot detect odours craved texture?
Ben & Jerry's
Ben & Jerry's co-founder Ben Cohen has anosmia, which flattens flavour, so he kept adding larger and larger chunks to satisfy his need for texture in food.
Q 08Which fish has taste sensors spread across its whole body, letting it taste anything it touches?
Catfish
Catfish have chemoreceptors across their entire bodies, especially on the barbels around the mouth, and rely on them so heavily that their eyes are generally small.
Q 09The burn of chillies is not a taste but a signal from nerve fibres that normally report heat and what else?
Pain
Pain and temperature fibres on the tongue are what chillies set off directly, which is why spicy food feels hot rather than tasting of anything.
Q 10Which metal sweetened the wine of ancient Rome, where grape must was boiled down in pots made of it?
Lead
Lead pots gave the boiled-down syrup, called sapa, a sweet-tasting compound later known as sugar of lead. Wine was still being adulterated with it in Beethoven's day.
Q 11Which savoury fifth basic taste did the chemist Kikunae Ikeda identify in 1908 while studying kelp broth?
Umami
Umami was Ikeda's name for the taste of glutamate in stock made from kombu seaweed, which he found distinct from sweet, sour, bitter and salty.
Q 12Which seasoning, first sold in Japan in 1909 under the name Ajinomoto, was patented by the discoverer of savoury taste?
MSG
MSG, short for monosodium glutamate, went on sale as Ajinomoto, meaning essence of taste. Studies have largely failed to tie it to the headaches of so-called Chinese restaurant syndrome.
Q 13What did psychologist Linda Bartoshuk call people who taste bitterness far more intensely than most others do?
Supertasters
Q 21Which bathroom product usually contains sodium lauryl sulfate, a foaming agent reported to dull sweetness for a while?
Toothpaste
Toothpaste gets its foam from this low-cost detergent, whose muting of sweet taste is often blamed for making oranges taste harsh just after brushing.
Q 22Which Chinese spice makes the mouth tingle and go numb, an effect likened to touching a battery to the tongue?
Sichuan pepper
Sichuan pepper owes its buzz to a compound called hydroxy-alpha sanshool, and paired with chilli it creates the numb-and-spicy flavour known as málà.
Q 23Which sweetener was found in the 1970s when a researcher, told to test a compound, reportedly tasted it by mistake?
Sucralose
Supertasters emerged in the 1990s, when Bartoshuk's team split people who can taste a bitter test chemical into medium and intense groups. Women are more likely to be among them.
Q 14Which other sense plays the biggest role in a food's flavour, which is why a head cold makes meals bland?
Smell
Smell plays the biggest role in flavour by its retronasal route, which psychologist Paul Rozin summed up as smelling while breathing out rather than in.
Q 15Which compound gives chillies their burn in mammals but goes unfelt by the birds that spread the seeds?
Capsaicin
Capsaicin fails to trigger the TRPV1 receptor in birds, so they eat the fruit and pass the seeds intact, whereas the molar teeth of mammals would destroy them.
Q 16Which American pharmacist gave his name to the scale that rates the heat of chillies, devised in 1912?
Wilbur Scoville
Wilbur Scoville had a panel of tasters sip chilli extract in sugar water at ever weaker strengths until most of them could no longer detect the heat.
Q 17Which compound from mint plants feels cool in the mouth because it triggers the body's cold-sensing receptors?
Menthol
Menthol chemically triggers TRPM8, the receptor that normally responds to cold, so mint seems to chill the mouth without lowering its temperature.
Q 18Which green Japanese paste stings the nasal passages more than the tongue and is often faked with dyed horseradish?
Wasabi
Wasabi is so hard to cultivate in bulk that most of the paste served outside Japan is a mixture of horseradish, mustard and green colouring.
Q 19Which artificial sweetener was discovered in 1879 when chemist Constantin Fahlberg noticed a sweet taste on his hand?
Saccharin
Saccharin came out of coal tar research in Ira Remsen's laboratory at Johns Hopkins. Fahlberg patented it on his own and grew wealthy, and Remsen called him a scoundrel.
Q 20Which fish-eating seabirds have lost the genes for tasting sweet, bitter and savoury foods, a 2015 study found?
Penguins
Penguins lost three of the five basic tastes more than 20 million years ago and never regained them, the University of Michigan-led genetic study concluded.
Sucralose turned out to be exceptionally sweet when Shashikant Phadnis, by one account, misheard his supervisor at a London college and put the chlorinated sugar in his mouth.
Q 24Which sweetener comes from the leaves of a plant the Guaraní people of South America called sweet herb?
Stevia
Stevia is about 50 to 300 times sweeter than sugar. The Swiss botanist Moisés Bertoni first described the plant in detail in 1899 while working in eastern Paraguay.
Q 25Which animal's genome revealed a broken receptor for savoury, meaty taste, a loss linked to its shift to plants?
Giant panda
Giant panda DNA carries two frameshift mutations in the T1R1 gene, though the loss was probably a result of the move to bamboo and not the reason for it.
Q 26Which nectar-feeding birds were shown in 2014 to taste sugar with the receptor other animals use for savoury taste?
Hummingbirds
Hummingbirds diverged from insect-eating swifts, and because birds lack the usual sweet receptor gene, their savoury receptor was adapted to detect the sugar in nectar.
Q 27Which fluid must dissolve the chemicals in food before they can reach the receptors inside a taste bud?
Saliva
Saliva carries dissolved food through small openings in the surface of the tongue, called taste pores, to the receptors waiting beneath.
Q 28The red, club-shaped bumps holding taste buds on the tongue's tip and sides are named for looking like what?
Mushrooms
Mushrooms, fungi in Latin, gave the fungiform papillae their name. The thread-like filiform papillae around them are far more numerous but hold no taste buds.
Q 29Which class of chemicals, including those in lemons and vinegar, do taste buds register as sourness?
Acids
Acids release hydrogen ions, which flow into sour-sensing taste cells through a channel called OTOP1. The same cells help the tongue to register carbonated water.
Q 30The discredited tongue map, giving each taste its own zone, grew from a 1901 paper written in which language?
German
German was the language of David Hänig's paper on taste thresholds. After a 1942 Harvard book replotted his graphs, tiny differences in sensitivity were misread as separate zones.