Q 01/05

Botanically speaking, a banana is which type of fruit?

A) A drupe

B) A pome

C) A berry

D) An aggregate fruit

Answer · why

C) A berry

The fruit has been described as a 'leathery berry', and the flesh can be split lengthwise into three sections matching its three carpels.

Q 02/05

The banana 'tree' is not a tree at all. Botanists rank it as the world's largest what?

A) Herb

B) Shrub

C) Palm

D) Fern

Answer · why

A) Herb

What looks like a trunk is a pseudostem of tightly packed leaf stalks, and the sheathing leaves can grow up to 1.6 metres a day.

Q 03/05

Bananas belong to which plant genus?

A) Ficus

B) Carica

C) Persea

D) Musa

Answer · why

D) Musa

The genus sits in the order Zingiberales alongside ginger, and around 85 species were recognised as of 2025.

Q 04/05

Nearly every edible banana descends from two wild species: M. acuminata and which other?

A) M. textilis

B) M. balbisiana

C) M. coccinea

D) M. velutina

Answer · why

B) M. balbisiana

Both species were first described by Luigi Aloysius Colla, and their hybrid carries the name Musa x paradisiaca.

Q 05/05

Cultivated bananas are seedless clones that typically carry how many sets of chromosomes?

A) Two (diploid)

B) Four (tetraploid)

C) Three (triploid)

D) Six (hexaploid)

Answer · why

C) Three (triploid)

The odd chromosome count is a big reason breeding is so hard: one Honduran project got only about 15 seeds from 30,000 hand-pollinated plants.