Tropical Trivia
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7correct to beat the crowd
This tropical trivia quiz has 48 free questions with answers and covers everything between the two tropics: the geography (where the Tropic of Cancer and Capricorn sit, the Amazon, Borneo, the Galápagos, the Maldives, Kilimanjaro's snow), the weather (hurricanes versus typhoons, trade winds and the doldrums), the wildlife (sloths, toucans, jaguars, capybaras, orangutans, poison dart frogs, hummingbirds and clownfish), the fruit bowl (pineapples, bananas, mangoes, coconuts, durian, jackfruit and dragon fruit) and the party (piña coladas, mai tais, mojitos, rum, tiki bars, ukuleles, hula and leis). It works as a round for a luau, beach party or summer pub quiz as well as a geography or biology warm-up. The easy questions are ones anyone who has been on holiday can answer; the medium ones ask about rainforest facts and famous islands; the hard ones want the child who worked out how to hand-pollinate vanilla, the town that invented the daiquiri and the year Puerto Rico made the piña colada official. Every answer has been checked against a reference encyclopaedia, and each question shows its explanation and citation once you have answered.
30 of 48 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01At roughly what latitude do the two tropics lie?
23.4 degrees
Both tropics lie at about 23.4 degrees of latitude, matching the tilt of Earth's axis; the Sun is directly overhead at each tropic on one solstice a year.
Q 02About what share of Earth's surface area lies within the tropics?
40%
About 40% of Earth's surface lies between the Tropics of Cancer and Capricorn, an area once called the torrid zone; it holds about 36% of the planet's land.
Q 03Which country holds about 60% of the Amazon rainforest?
Brazil
Brazil holds 60%, followed by Peru with 13% and Colombia with 10%; the forest holds an estimated 390 billion trees of some 16,000 species.
Q 04The Amazon River holds which world record?
Largest discharge of water
Whether it or the Nile is the longest river remains disputed.
Q 05Estimates say what share of all species live in rainforests?
40% to 75%
40% to 75% of all species are thought to be native to rainforests; millions of rainforest insects, plants and microbes are thought to be still undiscovered.
Q 06The Great Barrier Reef, in the Coral Sea, lies off the coast of which Australian state?
Queensland
Queensland's coast is separated from the reef by a channel up to 160 km wide; with 2,900 reefs and 900 islands it is the biggest single structure made by living organisms.
Q 07Coral bleaching happens when corals lose what?
Their symbiotic algae
Stress from warmer water, light or salinity makes them expel the algae and pigments that give them colour.
Q 08Clownfish live in size-based dominance hierarchies within their sea anemones; which individual ranks at the top?
The breeding female
The breeding female ranks at the top, followed by the breeding male and then the largest non-breeder; clownfish shelter in sea anemones and, in return, protect and clean them.
Q 09A tropical cyclone in the northwestern Pacific is called what?
A typhoon
A typhoon is the same storm that is called a hurricane in the Atlantic or northeastern Pacific; around 80 to 90 named ones form each year worldwide.
Q 10Sailors call the windless zone near the equator where the trade winds meet what?
The doldrums
The doldrums is the sailors' name for the calm, squally belt where the trade winds of both hemispheres converge; meteorologists call it the Intertropical Convergence Zone.
Q 11In the Northern Hemisphere tropics, the trade winds blow mainly from which direction?
The northeast
The northeast trades blow from the northeast because the Coriolis effect deflects air moving toward the equator to the right; south of the equator they arrive from the southeast.
Q 12Which naturalist studied the endemic species of the Galápagos Islands, about 900 km west of South America, in the 1830s?
Charles Darwin
Charles Darwin's study of the islands' endemic species inspired his theory of evolution by natural selection; the volcanic archipelago lies about 900 km west of mainland South America.
Q 13Which chain of 26 atolls is Earth's lowest-lying country, averaging about 1.5 metres in elevation?
The Maldives
Q 21Christopher Columbus first met the pineapple in 1493 on which island?
Guadeloupe
Columbus found the pineapple on Guadeloupe in November 1493, during his second voyage, and carried it back to Spain as piña de Indes, 'pine of the Indians'.
Q 22Botanically, what kind of fruit is a banana?
A berry
Botanically a banana is a berry, a fleshy fruit that develops from a single ovary; it grows on the largest herbaceous flowering plant in the world, not a tree.
Q 23Which banana variety became the dominant Western supermarket banana in the 1960s?
Cavendish
The Cavendish replaced the Gros Michel, which Panama disease had wiped out commercially, in the 1960s; it is a seedless triploid Musa acuminata cultivar.
The Maldives, a chain of 26 atolls in the Indian Ocean, is the world's lowest-lying country; its highest natural point is just 2.4 metres above the sea.
Q 14Borneo, the world's third-largest island, is divided among how many countries?
Three
Indonesia, Malaysia and Brunei share it; the Indonesian part is called Kalimantan.
Q 15Angel Falls, the world's tallest uninterrupted waterfall at 979 metres, is in which country?
Venezuela
Angel Falls is in Venezuela, dropping off the Auyán-tepui in Canaima National Park; it is named after US aviator Jimmie Angel, who flew over it in 1933.
Q 16Kilimanjaro, the highest mountain in Africa, sits just south of the equator in which country?
Tanzania
Kilimanjaro rises in northern Tanzania near the Kenyan border; a dormant volcano, it is the highest free-standing mountain in the world at 5,895 metres.
Q 17Singapore lies roughly how far north of the equator?
About one degree
About one degree of latitude, or roughly 137 km, separates Singapore from the equator.
Q 18Bali is unusual within Indonesia for being the only province with a majority of which religion?
Hinduism
About 86% of Balinese follow Balinese Hinduism.
Q 19Tahiti, in the Society Islands, is the largest island of which overseas collectivity of France?
French Polynesia
French Polynesia has around two-thirds of its people living on Tahiti.
Q 20In the wild, pineapples are pollinated mainly by which animal?
Hummingbirds
Wild pineapples are pollinated mainly by hummingbirds; because pollinated fruit fills with hard seeds, Hawaii, once the world's pineapple-canning capital, banned importing hummingbirds.
Q 24The mango is the national fruit of India, Pakistan and which other country?
The Philippines
The Philippines shares the mango as its national fruit with India and Pakistan; the mango tree is the national tree of Bangladesh, near where the fruit originated in South Asia.
Q 25The durian fruit is banned from some hotels and public transport in Singapore and Bangkok because of what?
Its lingering smell
Its lingering smell can persist for several days; the durian's Latin species name comes from the Italian for civet, whose musk the odour recalled.
Q 26Which is the largest of all tree-borne fruits, weighing up to 55 kg?
Jackfruit
The jackfruit is the largest tree-borne fruit, up to 55 kg and 90 cm long; it grows straight from the trunk and is native to southern India.
Q 27Dragon fruit grows on what kind of plant?
A cactus
Its Selenicereus cacti are native to southern Mexico and Central America.
Q 28Green papaya contains papain, an enzyme used in kitchens for what?
Tenderising meat
Papain, the protease in green papaya, is used for tenderising meat because it breaks down tough muscle proteins; it is the active ingredient in many commercial meat tenderisers.
Q 29In 1841 an enslaved boy on Réunion discovered how to hand-pollinate which crop?
Vanilla
Vanilla: 12-year-old Edmond Albius found the orchid's flowers could be fertilised by hand with a thin stick, freeing growers from its Mexican bee pollinators; Madagascar became the leading producer.
Q 30In pre-Hispanic Mesoamerica, cocoa beans were commonly used as what?
Currency
Cocoa beans served as currency: the Aztecs collected tribute in them and Spanish chroniclers recorded goods priced in beans; the cacao tree was domesticated over 5,000 years ago in South America.