Sorghum
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40 free Sorghum trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Sorghum is one of the world's great survivors: a tall grass that shrugs off heat and drought and feeds millions of people. Depending on where you live, you may know it as a thick, sweet syrup, a flatbread flour, a cloudy home-brewed beer, a clear and potent spirit, or simply as a crop grown for animals. This quiz covers the whole plant: where it was first farmed and how it travelled the world, how it is grown and what attacks it, the breads, syrups and drinks made from it, and its surprising turns in novels, films and folk tales. It is pitched at curious cooks, gardeners, farmers and pub-quiz regulars alike. Every answer comes with a short explanation, so you will finish knowing a good deal more about a crop that rarely gets its due.
30 of 40 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Whole sorghum grains can be prepared at home as a miniature version of which snack?
Popcorn
Popcorn made from sorghum looks like the usual kind, only much smaller. The grains burst when they are heated in hot oil.
Q 02In a Korean folktale explaining why sorghum stalks are red, which animal falls from the sky onto a stalk?
Tiger
Tiger blood stains the sorghum in the tale, after a rope snaps under the beast as it chases two children into the sky. The brother and sister climb on to become the Sun and the Moon.
Q 03The first known US record of sorghum is Benjamin Franklin's 1757 note on using it to make which household item?
Brooms
Brooms are still commonly made from the stiff seed-head fibres of one type of sorghum. In 1797 a Massachusetts farmer made one for his wife, and neighbours were soon asking for their own.
Q 04Sorghum has become a popular flour for people with coeliac disease because the grain naturally lacks which protein?
Gluten
Gluten is absent from sorghum, so the grain can stand in for wheat and rye in breads and even in beer.
Q 05Which clear East Asian spirit, usually distilled from fermented sorghum, is the most-consumed liquor in the world?
Baijiu
Baijiu outsells vodka about three to one by volume, and nearly all of it is drunk in China. Its name simply means white, or clear, liquor.
Q 06Sorghum syrup took root in Southern US kitchens when a naval blockade made cane sugar scarce during which war?
Civil War
Civil War blockades by the Union navy choked off Caribbean sugar, so Southern farms pressed their own sweetener. Anti-slavery families in the North grew sorghum too, to boycott sugar made by slave labour.
Q 07Which grain, introduced to Africa by the Portuguese, displaced sorghum as the main cereal outside the driest regions?
Maize
Maize won over African farmers because it was grown much like sorghum yet yielded far more. Sorghum held on where the rains were too unreliable for the newcomer.
Q 08Which people brought sorghum to North America, along with okra, sesame and black-eyed peas?
Enslaved Africans
Enslaved Africans carried the crop from West Africa through the Atlantic slave trade. It became a fixture of Southern cooking, prized for the sweet syrup pressed from its stalks.
Q 09In which present-day country was sorghum first domesticated over 5,000 years ago, near the rivers Atbara and Gash?
Sudan
Sudan holds the oldest domesticated sorghum, found at a site near Kassala in the east. From there the crop reached India about 4,000 years ago and West Africa a thousand years later.
Q 10Sorghum syrup poured over which hot baked item is a traditional breakfast in the Southern United States?
Biscuits
Biscuits split hot and doused in sorghum syrup are the classic pairing, though the syrup also goes on pancakes, grits and cornmeal mush.
Q 11Which Chinese novelist, awarded the 2012 Nobel Prize in Literature, made his name with the family saga Red Sorghum?
Mo Yan
Mo Yan filled his first novel with distillers of sorghum wine who become resistance fighters when Japan invades. He was the first Chinese citizen to win the literature Nobel.
Q 12About 80% of Ethiopia's sorghum crop goes into which spongy sour flatbread, more famously made from teff?
Injera
Injera uses so much sorghum that the grain costs more than wheat in Ethiopia, the reverse of most of the world. Sorghum versions are most common in the lowlands.
Q 13Nearly a third of the US sorghum crop is turned into which renewable fuel, using less water than rival crops?
Ethanol
Q 21Which actress made her screen debut in Red Sorghum as a bride sent to marry a distillery owner with leprosy?
Gong Li
Gong Li plays the narrator's grandmother, who inherits the sorghum wine distillery when her husband dies and rallies its workers to take new pride in their craft.
Q 22Which parasitic plant, known to botanists as Striga, fastens onto sorghum roots and can wipe out an entire crop?
Witchweed
Witchweed is so hard to control because most of its life cycle takes place underground. It infests about 40% of Africa's arable savanna.
Q 23Sorghum is the world's fifth-most important cereal; which crop sits just above it in fourth place?
Barley
Barley follows the three giant staple cereals in the ranking. Sorghum earns fifth place largely in hot, dry regions where the others struggle.
Ethanol from sorghum matches the yield per bushel of rival feedstocks while needing up to a third less water, which suits the dry Great Plains.
Q 14The US Sorghum Belt of mostly dryland farms runs from South Dakota down to the southern tip of which state?
Texas
Texas anchors the southern end of a belt where sorghum is planted on land too hot and dry for thirstier grains. Kansas, in the middle of the belt, is its heartland.
Q 15Sweet sorghum syrup is colloquially known across the southern United States as sorghum what?
Molasses
Molasses strictly means the syrupy by-product of refining cane or beet sugar. Sorghum syrup is no leftover: it is the boiled-down juice of the crushed stalks.
Q 16Sorghum is a food grain across Africa and Asia, but what is its most common use in the United States?
Livestock feed
Livestock feed takes the largest share, going into rations for poultry, cattle and pigs. China began buying American sorghum in 2013 for the same purpose.
Q 17Medieval Arab farmers spread sorghum as far west as Al-Andalus, a region of which present-day European country?
Spain
Spain was the western limit of a medieval exchange that moved African and Asian crops, among them cotton and citrus fruits, across the Arab world.
Q 18Young or drought-stressed sorghum plants can kill grazing cattle by releasing which fast-acting poison?
Cyanide
Cyanide is released from dhurrin, a compound the plant makes to repel insects. Dhurrin takes its name from the Arabic word for sorghum.
Q 19Which wild sorghum, counted among the world's ten worst weeds, is named after an Alabama plantation owner?
Johnson grass
Johnson grass spread after Colonel William Johnson sowed it on his river-bottom land around 1840. It has since reached every continent except Antarctica.
Q 20Which director's debut film, Red Sorghum, won the Golden Bear at the 1988 Berlin International Film Festival?
Zhang Yimou
Zhang Yimou filmed only the first two of the novel's five parts, setting the story at a rural distillery that makes sorghum liquor.
Q 24Umqombothi, a thick, sour, low-alcohol beer brewed with sorghum malt, is a tradition of which country?
South Africa
South Africa's home brewers test a batch by holding a lit match over the vat. If the carbon dioxide from the fermenting mash blows it out quickly, the beer is ready.
Q 25By which name is sorghum known across India, where its flour is hand-flattened into bhakri flatbreads?
Jowar
Jowar bhakri is everyday bread in Maharashtra and northern Karnataka. The dough is mixed with hot water and patted out by hand rather than rolled.
Q 26Ethiopian-born breeder Gebisa Ejeta won which 2009 award for sorghum hybrids that resist drought and a root parasite?
World Food Prize
World Food Prize honours went to Ejeta after he bred Africa's first commercial drought-tolerant sorghum hybrid. As a boy he walked 20 kilometres each week to reach his nearest elementary school.
Q 27The word sorghum may descend from a Latin term meaning a grass of which Middle Eastern country?
Syria
Syria is the likeliest root, by way of the Italian word sorgo, though the trail is uncertain. The crop itself came from Africa, not the Middle East.
Q 28A Yvonne Chaka Chaka hit named after the sorghum beer umqombothi plays over the opening scene of which 2004 film?
Hotel Rwanda
Hotel Rwanda opens with the song, one of the best-known hits of a singer nicknamed the Princess of Africa.
Q 29Which continent, far from the crop's African birthplace, is the native home of most wild sorghum species?
Australia
Australia's wild sorghums were gathered for food by Aboriginal peoples, and the Dagoman of the Northern Territory personify the plant as a spirit.
Q 30Chibuku, a carton-packed sorghum beer sold across Zambia and Malawi, takes its name from a local word for which object?
Book
Book is the root because brewer Max Heinrich logged every drinker's comment and recipe change in one. The beer is nicknamed Shake Shake, since the carton has to be shaken before the first sip.