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50 free Carrot trivia questions with answers — food & drink quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
Forty-one carrot trivia questions for gardeners, cooks, teachers and quiz-night hosts. The quiz covers where the carrot came from and why it was purple for centuries, how the Dutch made it orange, what beta-carotene does (and does not) do for your eyesight, the RAF's wartime carrot propaganda, and how a Californian farmer invented baby-cut carrots to save his rejects. There is a pop-culture side too: Bugs Bunny and the Clark Gable scene that started it all, Carrot Top, The Carrot Seed, carrot cake from medieval puddings to Swiss Rueblitorte, and the 10 kg Minnesota carrot that holds the world record. Questions start easy enough for kids and climb to details for the true vegetable nerd, and every one carries a difficulty score. Every answer has been checked against Wikipedia or a primary source such as Guinness World Records, and each question links to the page it came from.
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Q 01The carrot belongs to which plant family, alongside parsley, celery and dill?
Apiaceae
The family is also called Umbelliferae, and it includes some deadly lookalikes, so foraging for wild carrot demands care.
Q 02The domesticated carrot most likely originated in which region?
Iran
It is a tamed form of the wild carrot native to Europe and southwestern Asia; the earliest cultivated roots were purple and yellow, not orange.
Q 03What colour were most cultivated carrots in the 10th century?
Purple
Orange carrots did not appear until Dutch growers bred them in the 16th and 17th centuries.
Q 04Growers in which country created the orange carrot?
The Netherlands
The popular tale that it was bred to honour William of Orange is, according to most authorities, unproven.
Q 05Which pigment gives carrots their orange colour?
Beta-carotene
The pigment's very name comes from the Latin for carrot, carota, and it was first isolated from carrot juice in 1831.
Q 06Eat far too many carrots for too long and your skin may turn what colour?
Yellow-orange
Carotenemia is harmless and shows first on the palms and soles; unlike jaundice it leaves the whites of the eyes alone.
Q 07Britain's wartime story that carrots gave RAF pilots superb night vision was a cover for what?
Airborne radar
A night-fighter ace nicknamed 'Cat's Eyes' went along with the deception, and Britain ended 1942 with a 100,000-ton carrot surplus.
Q 08Which RAF night-fighter ace was nicknamed 'Cat's Eyes' as part of the carrot propaganda?
John Cunningham
He shot down twenty enemy aircraft, mostly by radar, and accepted the nickname as a necessary deception.
Q 09Carrots are what kind of plant, flowering only in their second year?
Biennial
Growers harvest the taproot in year one, before the plant spends its stored sugar on a tall flowering stalk.
Q 10Which country produces by far the most carrots, around 42% of the world total?
China
World production of carrots and turnips combined was about 45 million tonnes in 2024.
Q 11The English word 'carrot' was borrowed around 1530 from which language?
French
Carotte came from Latin carota, which in turn came from the Greek karoton.
Q 12Which long, slender, pointed carrot type is the one most widely grown commercially?
Imperator
Nantes carrots are blunt cylinders, Chantenay are short and broad-shouldered, and Danvers are conical.
Q 13Under good conditions, most carrot cultivars take roughly how long from seed to harvest?
70 to 80 days
Some varieties can take four months, which is why patient gardeners sow radishes in the same row as markers.
Q 21How did Bugs Bunny voice actor Mel Blanc handle the carrots he had to chew in the recording booth?
He spat them into a spittoon
He was not allergic to carrots, whatever the legend says; he just did not want to swallow between lines.
Q 22Which 1934 film is credited with indirectly creating the pop-culture link between rabbits and carrots?
It Happened One Night
Its carrot scene inspired Bugs Bunny, and rabbits have been stuck with the vegetable ever since.
Q 23Food historians trace carrot cake back to medieval puddings in which carrots substituted for what?
Sugar
Q 14Roughly what percentage of a raw carrot is water?
88%
A 100 g serving still delivers about 93 percent of your daily vitamin A.
Q 15The carrot's flower cluster is what botanical structure?
A compound umbel
Umbels of tiny white flowers look like lace, which is where the wild carrot's North American nickname comes from.
Q 16In North America the wild carrot is better known by what floral name?
Queen Anne's lace
Legend says the single dark floret at the centre is a drop of blood from the queen pricking her finger while making lace.
Q 17Which deadly lookalike is wild carrot most often confused with?
Poison hemlock
Wild carrot has hairy green stems and a root that smells of carrot; hemlock's stems are smooth and purple-blotched.
Q 18Baby-cut carrots were invented in 1986 by California farmer Mike Yurosek to solve what problem?
Wasted misshapen roots
He whittled the rejects into two-inch pieces; by 2006 most of America's baby-cut carrots came from Bakersfield.
Q 19Which Californian city was producing nearly three-quarters of America's baby-cut carrots by 2006?
Bakersfield
Bolthouse Farms and Grimmway Farms, both based there, are the world's two biggest baby-carrot processors.
Q 20Bugs Bunny's carrot-munching was modelled on which actor's scene in a 1934 romantic comedy?
Clark Gable
Freleng, Jones and Clampett all pointed to the 1934 film, which was also the first to sweep the five major Oscars.
Sweeteners were expensive, and carrots were among the sweetest things a medieval cook could grow.
Q 24Carrot cake enjoyed a revival in Britain during which event?
Second World War rationing
The Ministry of Food pushed carrots hard, and a sweet cake without much sugar suited the times.
Q 25Which country's traditional carrot cake, Rueblitorte, is topped with kirsch icing and marzipan carrots?
Switzerland
The 19th-century recipe comes from a housekeeping school in Kaiseraugst, in the canton of Aargau.
Q 26Modern British and American carrot cakes are usually iced with what?
Cream cheese frosting
Cinnamon, ginger and walnuts or pecans are the usual companions.
Q 27Who is credited with first isolating carotene, from carrot juice, in 1831?
Heinrich Wackenroder
He was actually hunting for a worm-killing medicine at the time.
Q 28The pigment in carrots is converted in the body into which nutrient?
Vitamin A
As a food colouring it carries the E number E160a.
Q 29Flamingos fed a diet with no carotene turn what colour?
White
Their pink comes from carotenoids in shrimp and algae, close cousins of the pigment in carrots.
Q 30How much did the world's heaviest carrot, grown in Minnesota in 2017, weigh?
10.17 kg
Christopher Qualley's monster grew a mass of secondary roots; the previous record was an English grower's 9.1 kg carrot.