Deserts
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7correct to beat the crowd
Explore the vast and mysterious world of deserts with our comprehensive free 147-question trivia quiz with answers. From the Sahara to the Gobi, challenge yourself with questions about desert geography, wildlife, climate, and history. Whether you're a geography enthusiast or just curious about arid landscapes, this quiz will test and expand your desert knowledge.
30 of 147 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01What does a camel's hump actually store?
Fat
Fat, not water: the hump is an energy reserve, and it goes limp and droops to one side as the camel uses it up when food is scarce.
Q 02Which non-polar desert is widely considered the driest on Earth?
Atacama
The Atacama Desert in South America receives extremely little rainfall, with some areas experiencing virtually no recorded precipitation, making it the driest non-polar desert.
Q 03Asia's Gobi Desert is classed as which type of desert?
Cold winter
Cold winter: the Gobi lies deep inside Asia, hundreds of kilometres from any ocean, so winds arrive already wrung dry; frost and even snow can settle on its dunes.
Q 04Which feature helps desert animals shed excess heat?
Large ears
Large ears work as radiators: when the blood vessels in them widen, warm blood spreads over a big surface and its heat escapes into the air, which is how desert hares keep cool.
Q 05What is the general term for plants that store water in thickened, fleshy stems, leaves or roots?
Succulents
Succulents keep water in swollen leaves, stems or roots; cacti are succulents, but many succulents, such as the jade plant, are not cacti.
Q 06What phenomenon often creates deserts on the leeward side of mountain ranges?
Rain shadow effect
Rain shadow effect: air descending the leeward slope is compressed and warmed, so it holds on to its moisture; the Himalayas cast such a shadow over the Gobi.
Q 07What do you call a fertile, watered pocket in the middle of a desert?
Oasis
An oasis is usually fed from underground: its springs and wells tap aquifers whose water may have fallen as rain hundreds of kilometres away.
Q 08What does the term 'desertification' describe?
Fertile dryland degrading into desert
Fertile dryland degrading into desert is what the UN convention means by the word; it stresses that the damage comes from human activity and climate swings, not from existing deserts naturally spreading.
Q 09Which two deserts are larger than the Sahara?
Antarctica and the Arctic
Antarctica and the Arctic count as deserts because so little rain or snow falls there; Antarctica alone covers about 14 million square kilometres, far more than the Sahara.
Q 10What is the dark reddish-brown to black coating on exposed desert rocks called?
Desert varnish
Desert varnish is a thin mineral coating of clay with iron and manganese oxides; many desert petroglyphs were made by carving through the dark layer to the paler rock beneath.
Q 11In which desert does the giant saguaro cactus grow wild?
Sonoran Desert
Sonoran Desert: wild saguaros grow only in Arizona, the Mexican state of Sonora and a sliver of south-eastern California; the Tohono O'odham turn the red fruit into syrup.
Q 12What single measure decides whether a place counts as a desert?
Very low annual precipitation
Very low annual precipitation is the test, usually under about 250 mm a year, not heat or sand: most desert is bare rock, gravel or mountain, with dunes covering only a small share.
Q 13What is the main advantage of nocturnal activity for desert animals?
Q 21What are the Kelso Dunes of California's Mojave Desert known for when their sand avalanches?
Giving off a low booming hum
Giving off a low booming hum: as sand slides down a steep face it sets up a deep rumble that can be felt as well as heard, and it takes smooth, rounded grains and thoroughly dry sand to make it.
Q 22Desert plants that complete their whole life cycle in a brief spell after rain are called what?
Ephemerals
Ephemerals turn normally bare Namaqualand in South Africa into a carpet of flowers each spring, after the winter rains.
Q 23What are dry desert lakebeds that temporarily fill with water after rain called?
Playas
To avoid heat and so conserve water
To avoid heat and so conserve water: an animal that sleeps through the scorching day and forages in the cool of night loses far less moisture to evaporation.
Q 14Which of these deserts is located in South America?
Patagonian Desert
Bounded by the Andes to the west and the Atlantic to the east, the Patagonian Desert was once forested: volcanic ash buried the trees and minerals turned the trunks to stone, leaving vast petrified forests.
Q 15Desert pavement, a surface of tightly packed stones, is traditionally explained by which process?
Wind erosion (deflation)
Wind erosion (deflation) is the classic account: the wind carries off the sand and silt and leaves a lag of packed stones, though some pavements are now thought to rise on dust trapped beneath them.
Q 16Every 20,000 years or so the Sahara flips between desert and what, due to Earth's wobble?
Savanna grassland
Savanna grassland: precession shifts where the North African monsoon falls, so a 'Green Sahara' of grass, lakes and hippos returns on a roughly 20,000-year cycle.
Q 17Which desert is known for holding the record for the highest air temperature ever recorded on Earth?
Death Valley
Death Valley reached 56.7°C (134°F) at Furnace Creek on 10 July 1913, yet it became the official record holder only in 2012, when the WMO struck out a higher 1922 reading from North Africa.
Q 18How does the desert kangaroo rat manage to live almost without drinking?
Metabolic water from seeds plus concentrated urine
Metabolic water from seeds plus concentrated urine: its body releases water as it breaks down dry seeds, and its kidneys pass very little of it back out.
Q 19The Spanish name of which Mojave Desert city means 'the meadows'?
Las Vegas
Las Vegas takes its name from the spring-fed grassy meadows that traders on the trail to California found in the valley in 1829; they have long since been buried under streets and car parks.
Q 20Which crescent-shaped sand formation has 'horns' pointing downwind?
Barchan
A barchan creeps downwind as sand blows up its gentle back and slides down the steep face between the horns; crescent dunes like it move faster than any other type.
Playas form where rain collects in a desert basin: the shallow lake evaporates and leaves another layer of salt and mud, which is why they end up so flat. The name is Spanish for 'beach'.
Q 24Which city on the Sahara's southern edge became an English byword for the middle of nowhere?
Timbuktu
Timbuktu was in truth a rich medieval hub where caravans traded Saharan salt for gold, and a famed centre of Islamic learning; only later did its name come to mean somewhere impossibly remote.
Q 25What do desert scorpions do under ultraviolet light?
Glow blue-green
Glow blue-green: chemicals in a scorpion's outer shell fluoresce under ultraviolet light, so researchers go looking for them at night with a black light.
Q 26What is a 'wadi' in a desert environment?
A riverbed that carries water only after heavy rain
A riverbed that carries water only after heavy rain, a wadi can turn into a flash flood within minutes, then empty again as the water sinks into its porous bed.
Q 27How do cacti keep their water loss so low?
Waxy cuticles and spines in place of leaves
Waxy cuticles and spines in place of leaves: with no leaf surface to lose water from, a cactus makes its food in the green stem, sealed under a thick waxy skin.
Q 28The Great Basin Desert, known for its sagebrush, is located on which continent?
North America
North America: the Great Basin Desert owes its name to a quirk of drainage, for none of its rivers reaches the sea; their water ends in closed valleys, salt lakes and dry sinks.
Q 29What Arabic-derived term names a barren, rocky desert plateau stripped of sand?
Hamada
Hamada is the Arabic term for a hard, barren rocky plateau from which the wind has stripped the sand; bare rock like this covers far more of the Sahara than dunes, which make up only about a quarter of it.
Q 30Which Arabian desert is known in English as the 'Empty Quarter'?
Rub' al Khali
Rub' al Khali covers some 650,000 square kilometres of southern Arabia; empty it may look, but part of Ghawar, the world's largest conventional oil field, lies beneath its northern sands.