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59 free Amazon Rainforest trivia questions with answers — geography quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
This Amazon rainforest trivia quiz covers the largest tropical forest on Earth: how big it is, how old it is, how many trees and species it holds, and the odd fact that its soil is fertilised by dust from the Sahara. It looks at the people who have lived there for over 11,000 years (terra preta, the geoglyphs, Percy Fawcett's City of Z, the Yanomami and the uncontacted groups) and the outsiders who came for gold and rubber: Orellana, the rubber barons of Manaus, Henry Wickham's smuggled seeds, Roger Casement, and Henry Ford's doomed Fordlândia. The second half covers what the forest is up against and what lives in it: cattle and soy, the Trans-Amazonian Highway, Belo Monte, the 2019 fires and the Amazon Fund, Chico Mendes and the empate, plus poison dart frogs, harpy eagles, Brazil nuts, giant water lilies, pink dolphins and açaí. Around a third of the questions are school-level; the rest will stretch geography teachers and pub quiz veterans. Our Amazon River quiz covers the river itself. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's articles on the Amazon rainforest, its deforestation, its peoples and its wildlife, and each explanation adds one more detail.
30 of 59 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01How many countries share the Amazon basin?
Nine
Nine countries share the basin, with Brazil holding by far the largest share, followed by Peru and Colombia; the count includes French Guiana, an overseas region of France.
Q 02Roughly what share of the Amazon rainforest lies inside Brazil?
About 60%
Brazil holds about 60% of the Amazon rainforest; Peru has about 13% and Colombia about 10%, with the remainder spread among the other basin countries.
Q 03Roughly how many individual trees are estimated to grow in the Amazon rainforest?
390 billion
A 2013 survey estimated about 390 billion individual trees in the Amazon, belonging to roughly 16,000 species, with a few hundred 'hyperdominant' species making up half of them.
Q 04What share of all the world's known species is said to live in the Amazon rainforest?
One in ten
About one in ten of the world's known species lives in the Amazon, including roughly 2.5 million insect species and some 2,000 birds and mammals.
Q 05How much of the world's remaining rainforest does the Amazon represent?
Over half
The Amazon represents over half of the planet's remaining rainforest and is the largest and most biodiverse tract of tropical rainforest on Earth.
Q 06Francisco de Orellana coined the name 'Amazon' after fighting tribes whose women did what?
Fought alongside the men
Orellana reported women who fought alongside the men, and named the river after the Amazons, the warrior women of Greek myth described by Herodotus.
Q 07In which year did Orellana become the first European to travel the length of the Amazon River?
1542
Orellana's expedition reached the Atlantic in 1542 after descending the river from the Andes; his reports of populous settlements along the banks, long dismissed, now look accurate.
Q 08Excavations at Caverna da Pedra Pintada show humans settled the Amazon at least how long ago?
11,200 years
Excavations at Caverna da Pedra Pintada near Monte Alegre date human settlement of the Amazon to at least 11,200 years ago; by AD 1250 there were substantial settlements around the forest's edge.
Q 09Which British explorer vanished in the 1920s searching the Amazon for a lost civilisation he called the City of Z?
Percy Fawcett
Percy Fawcett disappeared in 1925 with his son Jack while searching for his 'Z'; geoglyphs found since the 1970s support the idea of large pre-Columbian societies.
Q 10What gives terra preta, the dark fertile earth found across the Amazon, its black colour?
Charcoal added by ancient people
Terra preta owes its black colour to charcoal added by ancient people, along with pottery shards and organic waste; it is now accepted as a product of indigenous soil management.
Q 11More than half the dust that fertilises the Amazon blows in from a single depression in which desert?
The Sahara
The Bodélé depression in Chad, in the Sahara, supplies more than half of the dust; its phosphorus replaces what rain washes out of the Amazon's soil each year.
Q 12Roughly how long has the Amazon rainforest existed?
At least 55 million years
The Amazon rainforest has existed for at least 55 million years, probably forming in the Eocene once the Atlantic was wide enough to deliver a warm, moist climate to the basin.
Q 13What proportion of the Amazon rainforest had been deforested by 2022?
Around 20%
Q 21Which country has been the largest donor to Brazil's Amazon Fund, set up in 2008 to fight deforestation?
Norway
Norway has provided the overwhelming majority of the Amazon Fund's donations since 2008, with Germany and the oil company Petrobras the next biggest contributors.
Q 22Chico Mendes, the Amazon activist murdered in 1988, worked in what trade?
Rubber tapper
Chico Mendes was a rubber tapper who led his fellow tappers' union in defending the forest their trade depended on; he was shot dead at his home in December 1988.
Q 23In which Brazilian state was Chico Mendes born and killed?
Acre
Mendes was born in and killed at Xapuri, in the state of Acre; the rancher Darly Alves da Silva, who had claimed part of a nearby rubber reserve, ordered the killing.
Around 20% of the Amazon rainforest had been cleared by 2022; scientists warn that at 20–25% loss the forest could tip into degraded savanna.
Q 14What is the primary cause of deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon, responsible for about 80% of it?
Cattle ranching
Cattle ranching accounts for about 80% of clearing in the Brazilian Amazon, far ahead of soy, logging and mining; pasture is usually the first use of newly cleared land.
Q 15Which road, opened in 1972, is blamed for opening the interior of the Amazon to large-scale clearing?
The Trans-Amazonian Highway
The Trans-Amazonian Highway, officially BR-230, was inaugurated in 1972 and runs about 4,000 km across northern Brazil, much of it never paved.
Q 16Which two Brazilian states have suffered the highest levels of Amazon deforestation?
Mato Grosso and Pará
Mato Grosso and Pará have lost the most forest of any Brazilian states: Mato Grosso to soy and cattle expansion along the 'arc of deforestation', Pará to ranching, logging and roads.
Q 17What did the 2006 Soy Moratorium ban?
Buying soy from newly deforested land
Under the 2006 Soy Moratorium, major grain traders agreed to stop buying soy from newly deforested land in the Amazon biome, after a Greenpeace campaign and pressure from European retailers.
Q 18Deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon fell by about how much in the first ten months of 2023 under Lula?
50%
Satellite alerts showed deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon down about 50% in January–October 2023 compared with the same months of 2022, after Lula restored enforcement.
Q 19Smoke from the 2019 Amazon fires darkened the daytime sky over which city thousands of km away?
São Paulo
On 19 August 2019 smoke carried from the burning Amazon turned the afternoon sky over São Paulo dark, more than 2,000 km from the fires, drawing global attention.
Q 20What did President Bolsonaro do after INPE reported deforestation up 88% in June 2019?
Fired the agency's director
Bolsonaro called INPE's data lies and fired the agency's director, Ricardo Galvão, in August 2019; after G7 pressure over the fires he sent 44,000 troops to the region.
Q 24What was the 'empate' tactic used by Chico Mendes and his followers?
A human blockade to stop forest clearing
An empate was a human blockade: families stood in front of chainsaw crews to stop forest clearing; the movement also produced the concept of extractive reserves.
Q 25The first Amazon rubber boom ran roughly from 1879 until which year?
1912
The first Amazon rubber boom ran from 1879 to 1912, collapsing once Asian plantations undercut wild Brazilian rubber; a brief second boom came during World War II, from 1942 to 1945.
Q 26Who smuggled some 70,000 rubber tree seeds from Brazil to Kew Gardens in 1876?
Henry Wickham
Henry Wickham shipped the seeds from Santarém in 1876; only about 4% germinated, but the seedlings sent on to Ceylon and Singapore founded Asia's rubber plantations.
Q 27Which Irish diplomat documented the enslavement and torture of natives in Peru's Putumayo region in 1910-11?
Roger Casement
Roger Casement, then a British consul, investigated the Peruvian Amazon Company's rubber stations on the Putumayo in 1910–11, after exposing similar atrocities in the Congo in 1904.
Q 28Manaus's Teatro Amazonas opera house, built with rubber money, opened in which year?
1896
The Teatro Amazonas was inaugurated on 31 December 1896, built with bricks from Europe, French glass and Italian marble at the height of the rubber boom.
Q 29Which animal, the world's largest rodent, grazes along Amazon rivers and wetlands?
Capybara
The capybara, the world's largest rodent, is a semi-aquatic grazer that lives in groups along rivers and wetlands across the Amazon basin, escaping jaguars by diving.
Q 30Where did Ford move his rubber project after abandoning Fordlândia in 1934?
Belterra
Ford moved the project to Belterra, 40 km south of Santarém on a flatter site better suited to rubber; synthetic rubber killed demand and Ford sold up in 1945.