Corn Trivia
0Loading crowd target
0Loading crowd target
6correct to beat the crowd
This corn trivia quiz has 49 free questions with answers and covers the whole plant and everything made from it: where maize was domesticated and from what, how a cob is built, why the world grows more of it than wheat or rice, and how the Maya's alkali trick kept them healthy while Europeans who copied the crop got sick. Then it moves to the fun stuff: how popcorn pops and what the unpopped kernels are called, why bourbon has to be at least half corn, who invented candy corn and corn flakes, the record corn maze, the Corn Palace and its mascot. The opening questions suit a classroom or a harvest-festival table; the back half will test a farmer or a food historian. Every answer comes with a short explanation. Every question has been checked against a primary source, mostly Wikipedia's maize, popcorn and food-history articles, and shows its citation once you have answered.
30 of 49 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which author's short story 'Children of the Corn' launched a long-running horror film series?
Stephen King
Stephen King also wrote a screenplay for the first film in 1984, but the studio had it rewritten, and the finished picture credits George Goldsmith as its only screenwriter.
Q 02Corn was first domesticated about 9,000 years ago in which present-day country?
Mexico
Mexico's Balsas River valley is where corn began: grinding stones from a rock shelter there carry traces of corn about 8,700 years old, showing people were already milling it.
Q 03What is the wild grass from which corn was domesticated?
Teosinte
Teosinte hardly looks like corn: it is a bushy, many-branched grass whose tiny ears hold a handful of seeds, each locked in a stone-hard case, and changes in a few key genes made the difference.
Q 04Native Americans grew corn alongside beans and squash in a planting system known as what?
The Three Sisters
In the Three Sisters system cornstalks held up the climbing beans, the beans fixed nitrogen for the soil, and broad squash leaves shaded out weeds and kept the ground moist.
Q 05The male flowers at the top of a cornstalk are called what?
The tassel
The tassel is the cluster of male flowers at the top of the stalk; its pollen drifts on the wind down to the silks, the female parts that emerge from the developing ear.
Q 06Each strand of corn silk connects to what?
A single kernel
Each silk strand is the style of one female flower; a pollen grain landing on it grows a tube down to fertilise a single kernel, so every kernel on the cob has its own silk.
Q 07The rows of kernels on an ear of corn almost always add up to what kind of number?
Even
Even is the rule, usually 16 or so: each row on a young ear starts as one line of cells that divides into a pair, so the rows come in twos.
Q 08Which pigments give yellow corn its colour?
Carotenoids
Carotenoids, the pigment family that turns carrots orange, colour yellow corn; flamingos owe their pink-orange feathers to the same pigments, taken in with their food.
Q 09In 2020 corn's harvest outweighed wheat's and rice's, but which crop beat all three by tonnage?
Sugarcane
Sugarcane led with about 1.9 billion tonnes in 2020 to corn's 1.16 billion, because cane is weighed as whole fresh stalks, and only about a seventh of that weight is sugar.
Q 10Which country grew the most corn in 2020, with about 31 percent of world output?
The USA
The USA grew about 31 percent of the world's corn in 2020, ahead of China's 22 percent; it is also the biggest exporter, yet roughly 85 percent of the crop is used at home.
Q 11Which type of corn makes up almost all the grain corn grown commercially in the US?
Dent corn
Dent corn is named for the dimple that forms in each kernel's crown as it dries; it accounts for nearly all US grain corn, while the sweet corn eaten off the cob is only about one percent of plantings.
Q 12At which stage of kernel development is sweet corn picked for eating?
The milk stage
The milk stage is when a punctured kernel oozes milky white juice, about three weeks after the silks appear; left longer the sweetness fades, so sweet corn is eaten, canned or frozen fast.
Q 13Which scientist won a 1983 Nobel Prize for showing that genes can move, a discovery she made in corn?
Barbara McClintock
Q 21Corn uses which photosynthetic pathway, shared with sorghum and millet?
C4
Corn is a C4 plant: it concentrates CO2 in special bundle-sheath cells, so it can keep its leaf pores more closed and loses far less moisture than C3 crops such as soybeans.
Q 22US corn yields climbed sharply from the 1930s after farmers adopted what kind of seed?
Hybrid seed
Hybrid seed, made by crossing inbred lines to restore the vigour that inbreeding drains, reached farmers in quantity around 1930; by 1950 almost all Corn Belt corn was grown from it.
Q 23Apart from animal feed, what has been the US corn crop's biggest use since 2010?
Ethanol fuel
Ethanol fuel has taken roughly a third or more of the US corn crop since the late 2000s, driven by the Renewable Fuel Standard of 2005 and 2007; exports and corn syrup take far smaller shares.
Barbara McClintock traced the speckled colours of corn kernels to genes that jump between chromosomes; she found them in the 1940s, over 30 years before the Nobel committee honoured her alone.
Q 14Old American farm wisdom said a good crop was on track if the corn was 'knee-high' by when?
The Fourth of July
The Fourth of July was the benchmark in 'knee-high by the Fourth of July'; today's corn is planted weeks earlier, so by then fields usually stand far taller than that.
Q 15Soaking corn in an alkali solution, a process the Maya used, is called what?
Nixtamalization
Nixtamalization means cooking and soaking corn in limewater or wood-ash lye; the alkali loosens the tough hulls so they rinse away and softens the kernels enough to grind.
Q 16Which deficiency disease broke out wherever unprocessed corn became a staple food?
Pellagra
Pellagra, the niacin-deficiency disease marked by dermatitis, diarrhoea and dementia, swept corn-dependent populations in Europe and the US South; alkali treatment, used by Mesoamericans for millennia, unlocks the grain's bound niacin.
Q 17The corn dough used to make tortillas and tamales is called what?
Masa
Masa is simply Spanish for dough: corn cooked in limewater is stone-ground into it, or dried into the instant flour masa harina.
Q 18Mămăligă, a thick cornmeal porridge, is a national dish of which country?
Romania
Mămăligă is Romania's cornmeal porridge, boiled so thick it can be sliced like bread; Jonathan Harker eats 'mamaliga' for breakfast at the start of Bram Stoker's Dracula.
Q 19Which seafaring nation's traders introduced corn to Africa in the 16th century?
The Portuguese
The Portuguese brought corn from the Americas to Africa in the 16th century; it spread so widely that it is now the continent's most important cereal crop.
Q 20For which food did early Spanish settlers refuse to substitute corn flour for wheat?
Communion bread
Communion bread had to be wheat: church doctrine held that only wheat bread could become the body of Christ, a rule Catholic canon law still keeps, so corn flour would not do.
Q 24Which whiskey must by US law be made from a mash of at least 51 percent corn?
Bourbon
Bourbon needs a mash of at least 51 percent corn and brand-new charred oak barrels; since a barrel can never be reused for bourbon, most are sold on to age Scotch and other spirits.
Q 25The 'HFCS 55' grade of high-fructose corn syrup is used mostly to sweeten what?
Soft drinks
Soft drinks get HFCS 55, the higher-fructose grade; Coca-Cola and Pepsi finished switching their US recipes to it in 1984, because import quotas and tariffs had made the sweetener it replaced far dearer.
Q 26The Kellogg brothers developed flaked cereal in the 1890s as food for what kind of institution?
A sanitarium
A sanitarium in Battle Creek, the health resort where both brothers worked, first served the flakes to its patients; John and Will later fought in court for years over the right to the family name.
Q 27Which Battle Creek rival of the Kelloggs launched Grape-Nuts cereal in 1897?
C. W. Post
C. W. Post saw the Kelloggs' cereal-making first-hand in Battle Creek, then set up his own company in the same town; he was later accused of copying the Kelloggs' recipes.
Q 28A popcorn kernel swells to roughly how many times its original size when it pops?
About 40 times
About 40 times: a kernel puffs up to between 20 and 50 times its size, and the first starch to burst out forms a leg that pushes off the pan, which is why popcorn jumps as it pops.
Q 29A popcorn kernel bursts when what, trapped inside its hull, reaches about nine times normal air pressure?
Steam
Steam does the work: moisture inside the kernel boils but cannot escape the tough hull until, at about 135 psi, the hull splits and the soft interior puffs into foam.
Q 30Kernels that fail to pop are known in the popcorn trade by what nickname?
Old maids
Old maids are kernels that never pop, usually because they have dried out too much to build the pressure needed to burst; adding a little moisture back before popping can revive them.