Peach Trivia
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This peach trivia quiz has 50 free questions with answers and covers the fruit from every side. The botany: what a drupe is, why nectarines are the same species, how many hours of winter chill a tree needs and why a late frost is a grower's nightmare. The history: domestication in China thousands of years earlier than anyone thought, the Roman 'Persian apple', the Spanish who carried it to the Americas and the Navajo orchards Kit Carson burned. And the culture: Peach Melba, the Bellini, the fuzzy navel, the Peach Bowl, Ty Cobb, Momotaro, Roald Dahl and Princess Peach. The opening questions suit a summer picnic or a classroom; the back half will test a fruit grower or a food historian. Every answer comes with a short explanation. Every question has been checked against a primary source, mostly Wikipedia's peach article and the New Georgia Encyclopedia, and shows its citation once you have answered.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which actor sang the piano ballad 'Peaches' as Bowser in the 2023 animated Mario movie?
Jack Black
Jack Black co-wrote and sang Bowser's lovesick ballad to the princess; the directors had first pictured a heavier metal number in the style of his band Tenacious D.
Q 02A peach with a fuzz-free glossy skin is sold under what name?
Nectarine
Nectarine is the name for a fuzzless peach: it is the same species, not a hybrid, and a single recessive gene switches off the fuzz.
Q 03Peaches, cherries, plums and apricots all belong to which genus?
Prunus
Prunus is the stone-fruit genus, whose members wrap a single hard pit in fleshy fruit; they are close enough kin for breeders to cross them, producing hybrids such as the aprium and the pluot.
Q 04In which animated film is Peach a starfish living in a dentist's office aquarium?
Finding Nemo
Finding Nemo's Peach, voiced by Allison Janney, belongs to the Tank Gang, the aquarium fish who hatch a plan to clog the filter and escape from a dentist's office in Sydney.
Q 05The fuzz on a peach's skin is made of tiny hairs called what?
Trichomes
Trichomes are hairlike outgrowths of a plant's surface cells, and a peach's fuzz is a dense coat of them; such hairs help plants fend off insects and cut water loss.
Q 06In China the peach is a traditional symbol of what?
Longevity
Longevity is what the peach stands for: Shouxing, the god of long life, is usually shown holding one, and peach-wood charms were hung over doors to keep out evil.
Q 07Peaches whose flesh pulls cleanly away from the pit are called what?
Freestone
Freestone peaches release the pit cleanly and are the ones sold for eating fresh; clingstones, which hold the pit tightly, usually end up in cans.
Q 08Because of its hard seed casing, the peach is botanically classified as what kind of fruit?
A drupe
A drupe is a fruit with a fleshy layer around a hard, woody shell that holds the seed; 'stone fruit' is the everyday name, and the coconut is a drupe too, not a true nut.
Q 09Roughly how long does a peach tree keep bearing fruit before growers replace it?
About 15 years
About 15 years is a common figure: peach trees are short-lived, bearing for 10 to 20 years, so orchards are replanted far sooner than most people expect of a fruit tree.
Q 10The word 'peach' comes from a Latin name meaning the apple of which land?
Persia
Persia: the Romans called the fruit malum Persicum, 'Persian apple', because it reached Europe by way of Persia, and the name wore down through Old French pesche into 'peach'.
Q 11Yellow peach flesh gets its colour from which group of pigments?
Carotenoids
Carotenoids, the pigments that colour carrots, tint yellow peach flesh; white peaches make them too, but an enzyme breaks them down, and yellow varieties carry only broken copies of its gene.
Q 12The smooth-skinned peach is often wrongly believed to be a peach crossed with which other fruit?
Plum
Plum is the usual guess, but the fuzzless fruit is simply a peach carrying a recessive allele that switches off the fuzz; no plum is involved.
Q 13In Roald Dahl's James and the Giant Peach, the peach ends its flight impaled on which landmark?
The Empire State Building
Q 21Peaches are 'climacteric' fruits, meaning they do what?
Keep ripening after picking
Keep ripening after picking is what climacteric means: the fruit produces a burst of ethylene that goes on softening it and developing its aroma off the tree, which is why peaches are shipped firm.
Q 22Which singer's 2021 single 'Peaches', featuring Daniel Caesar and Giveon, debuted at number one on the Billboard Hot 100?
Justin Bieber
Justin Bieber first teased the song in a piano clip on Instagram in 2020; a producer screen-recorded that video and built the beat of the finished track over it.
Q 23Which Georgia-based rock band named its 1972 double album Eat a Peach?
The Empire State Building's spire skewers the peach after a passing plane cuts the seagulls' strings; New Yorkers first take it for a bomb, and in the end the city's children eat it.
Q 14In Journey to the West, who is put in charge of heaven's peach orchard and eats the fruit himself?
The Monkey King
The Monkey King, Sun Wukong, was made guardian of the orchard, ate nearly all the ripe peaches, then stole the wine from a heavenly banquet he had not been invited to.
Q 15Roman wall paintings of peaches survive from Herculaneum thanks to which volcano's eruption in 79 CE?
Vesuvius
Vesuvius buried Herculaneum deep in volcanic ash, which preserved the peach paintings; the fragments are now kept in the National Archaeological Museum in Naples.
Q 16Who first brought the peach to the Americas?
Spanish explorers
Spanish explorers carried the peach to the Americas in the 16th century; in the 1600s Indigenous communities, among them ancestors of the Muscogee, passed it along their own networks across the Southeast.
Q 17In 1864 Kit Carson's expedition destroyed thousands of peach trees in Canyon de Chelly to break which people?
The Navajo
The Navajo were starved into surrender and marched to Bosque Redondo on the Long Walk; a treaty in 1868 finally let the survivors return home to the canyon.
Q 18From 2006 to 2013 the Peach Bowl dropped the fruit from its title and took only which sponsor's name?
Chick-fil-A
Chick-fil-A, already the game's title sponsor, had it renamed the Chick-fil-A Bowl in 2006; 'Peach' returned in 2014, when the game joined the College Football Playoff rotation.
Q 19Peach kernels contain amygdalin, which the body breaks down into which poison?
Cyanide
Cyanide is released when amygdalin, concentrated in the kernel inside the pit, is broken down by enzymes in the gut, which is why peach kernels should not be eaten in quantity.
Q 20Peach leaf curl, a fungal disease that puckers and reddens new leaves, thrives in which weather?
Cool winter rain
Cool winter rain washes the fungus's spores onto swelling buds, so the infection takes hold in wet late winters and early springs; growers in such climates rely on dormant-season fungicide sprays.
The Allman Brothers Band
The Allman Brothers Band took the title from a remark by guitarist Duane Allman about eating a peach for peace whenever he was in Georgia; he died in a motorcycle crash before the album was finished.
Q 24The flat, doughnut-shaped peach is often sold under the name of which planet?
Saturn
Saturn peach is one trade name for the flat peach; another, paraguayo, is misleading, since the variety most likely arose in China, not Paraguay.
Q 25In the Ice Age films, Peaches is the daughter of Manny and Ellie, who are what kind of animal?
Woolly mammoths
Woolly mammoths Manny and Ellie become parents in Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs; 'Peaches' was their code word for Ellie going into labour, and it stuck as the baby's name.
Q 26Escoffier created Peach Melba in the 1890s to honour an opera singer from which country?
Australia
Australia was Nellie Melba's homeland; Escoffier's first version at the Savoy came perched on an ice swan, a nod to her role in Lohengrin.
Q 27Along with peaches and vanilla ice cream, what is the third essential ingredient of a Peach Melba?
Raspberry sauce
Raspberry sauce, a sweetened raspberry purée, completes the dish: Escoffier added it a few years after the Savoy original, when he reworked the recipe at the Carlton in London.
Q 28The Bellini cocktail of peach purée and Prosecco was invented at Harry's Bar in which city?
Venice
Venice's Harry's Bar is where its founder Giuseppe Cipriani created the drink, naming it after the painter Giovanni Bellini because its pink colour reminded him of one of his canvases.
Q 29A fuzzy navel is a mix of peach schnapps and what?
Orange juice
Orange juice is the mixer, the 'navel' in the name coming from navel oranges and the 'fuzzy' from the peach; add a shot of vodka and it becomes a 'hairy navel'.
Q 30The Peachoid, a giant peach-shaped water tower in South Carolina, features in which political drama?
House of Cards
House of Cards sends Frank Underwood home to Gaffney in its third episode to calm a scandal over the Peachoid, the real water tower that stands beside the interstate there.