Q 01/05

The silver fern, a tree fern whose fronds are white underneath, is a national symbol of which country?

A) Ireland

B) South Africa

C) Australia

D) New Zealand

Answer · why

D) New Zealand

New Zealand's Māori stories tell of hunters laying the fronds pale side up, so the undersides caught the moonlight and marked the way home.

Q 02/05

Old European folklore held that carrying the dust-like 'seed' of a fern gave a person which power?

A) Invisibility

B) Levitation

C) Immortality

D) Shape-shifting

Answer · why

A) Invisibility

Invisibility made a kind of sense: nobody could find a fern's seed, so the seed had to be unseen and able to pass that on. Thieves in Shakespeare's He...

Q 03/05

Ferns reproduce with spores instead of seeds, a habit they share with which other group of plants?

A) Grasses

B) Mosses

C) Orchids

D) Palms

Answer · why

B) Mosses

Mosses also spread by spores, but ferns are vascular plants, with internal veins that carry water and let some of them grow as tall as trees.

Q 04/05

The resurrection fern, which carpets oak limbs in the American South, is named for surviving what?

A) Forest wildfires

B) Hard frosts

C) Salt spray

D) Long droughts

Answer · why

D) Long droughts

Long droughts curl it into a grey-brown husk that has lost up to 97 percent of its water, yet a day or two after rain it is green again.

Q 05/05

For more than a thousand years, Asian farmers have floated the tiny fern Azolla on flooded fields of which crop?

A) Rice

B) Taro

C) Lotus

D) Wasabi

Answer · why

A) Rice

Rice gets free fertilizer from Azolla, which shelters bacteria in its leaves that pull nitrogen straight out of the air.