Rainforests
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97 free Rainforests trivia questions with answers — nature quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
42 free rainforests trivia questions with answers. Jungle trivia usually stops at 'the Amazon is big'. This quiz goes further: where the word jungle actually comes from, why a real rainforest interior is surprisingly easy to walk through, how much of the Amazon's fertiliser blows in from the Sahara, and which president gave piranhas their reputation. It covers the three great tropical forests, the Amazon, the Congo Basin and Australia's ancient Daintree, plus temperate rainforests and the forest peoples of Africa and Borneo. The animal rounds are the fun part: jaguars, sloths and their algae, poison dart frogs, harpy eagles, orangutans, okapis, capybaras, leafcutter and bullet ants, tarsiers, mountain gorillas, the stinking hoatzin and the pink river dolphin. There are plants too, from the largest single flower on Earth to the kapok fibre once stuffed into life jackets and the rubber seeds smuggled to Kew. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia and carries a citation. Difficulty ranges from questions an eight-year-old naturalist will get to ones that need a field guide.
30 of 97 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01After the Amazon, the world's second-largest tropical rainforest lies in which river basin?
Congo
Congo's rainforest hides a vast swamp of peat, mapped only in 2017, that locks away about 30 billion tonnes of carbon, about as much as all the basin's trees hold above ground.
Q 02The Amazon rainforest lies on which continent?
South America
South America's great river rises in the Andes only a short distance from the Pacific, then crosses almost the whole continent the other way, draining the rainforest east to the Atlantic.
Q 03What is the uppermost stratum of a rainforest, where the tallest trees rise above the rest, called?
Emergent layer
Emergent layer life is so exposed, with strong winds, full sun and only slender top branches to stand on, that most of its animals are fliers: eagles, bats and butterflies.
Q 04What is the main purpose of the pointed 'drip tips' on many rainforest leaves?
To shed excess rainwater
To shed excess rainwater: the narrow point works like a spout, so rain runs to the tip and drips away, and the leaf dries quickly instead of staying wet in the humid air.
Q 05Which big cat is the apex predator of the Amazon rainforest?
Jaguar
Jaguar jaws are strong enough to pierce turtle shells, and the cat often kills by biting straight through the back of its prey's skull instead of going for the throat.
Q 06What is considered the leading cause of deforestation in tropical rainforests globally?
Agricultural expansion
Agricultural expansion causes the great majority of forest loss, chiefly for cattle pasture and crops such as soy and oil palm; even the fires are mostly set on purpose, to burn felled trees and clear the land.
Q 07Rainforest trees pump water from the soil and release it as vapour through their leaves, a process called what?
Transpiration
Transpiration returns so much moisture to the air that the Amazon makes about half of its own rainfall, so clearing trees upwind means less rain for the forest downwind.
Q 08Which country has the largest share of the Amazon rainforest within its borders?
Brazil
Brazil is home to the largest portion of the Amazon rainforest, containing approximately 60% of its total area.
Q 09Soaked by year-round rain, what are most tropical rainforest soils like?
Heavily leached and nutrient-poor
Heavily leached and nutrient-poor soils lie under even the lushest forest: rain washes soluble nutrients away, so the trees live off their own litter, which rots fast and is taken straight back up by shallow roots.
Q 10The word 'jungle' comes from a Sanskrit word that, oddly for a rainforest term, meant what?
Rough and arid
Rough and arid: Sanskrit jangala meant dry, thinly wooded ground, and after the word reached English through Hindi in the 18th century its meaning drifted all the way to lush forest.
Q 11Strictly, a jungle differs from a rainforest interior mainly by what?
Its dense, tangled ground-level vegetation
Its dense, tangled ground-level vegetation needs light: under a closed rainforest canopy the floor is dim and fairly easy to walk through, so jungle springs up at clearings, edges and riverbanks.
Q 12Which spiky Southeast Asian rainforest fruit smells so strong that Singapore bans it from its trains?
Durian
Durian's smell, likened to turpentine, onions and gym socks, seeps out even through the unopened husk, yet the custard-like flesh inside tastes mild and sweet.
Q 13Which of these comes from a plant first used in the upper Amazon more than 5,000 years ago?
Q 21The Daintree takes its name from Richard Daintree, who was what?
A geologist and photographer
Richard Daintree (1832–78) was a Queensland government geologist and pioneering field photographer; in 2021 the eastern Kuku Yalanji people won formal ownership of over 160,000 hectares, including the national park.
Q 22Which bird of the Amazon rainforest is famous for its huge, brightly coloured bill?
Toucan
Toucan bills double as radiators: a study of the largest species found the bird can shed body heat by sending extra blood into its bill, much as an elephant does with its ears.
Q 23The Mbuti, Efe, Aka and Baka peoples are hunter-gatherers of the rainforests of which region?
Central Africa
Chocolate
Chocolate comes from cacao, long thought to have been tamed first in Mexico and Central America, until traces at a 5,300-year-old site in Ecuador showed that people of the upper Amazon were using it first.
Q 14Which European country holds a slice of the Amazon rainforest through an overseas territory?
France
France governs French Guiana, one of the nine territories that share the Amazon, as part of France itself, so a corner of the rainforest lies inside the European Union and uses the euro.
Q 15The Amazon rainforest is estimated to hold roughly how many trees?
390 billion
390 billion is the standard estimate, nearly 50 trees for every person on Earth; the 2013 survey behind it also found that just 227 of the Amazon's roughly 16,000 tree species make up half of them.
Q 16Phosphorus that helps fertilise the Amazon arrives each year as dust blown from where?
The Sahara desert
The Sahara desert's dust crosses the Atlantic each year carrying about as much phosphorus as the Amazon loses to rain and floods; much of it rises from an ancient lakebed in Chad.
Q 17Who was the first European to travel the length of the Amazon River, in 1542?
Francisco de Orellana
Francisco de Orellana named the river after the warrior women of Greek myth following a fight with local tribes in 1542; his reports of large riverside cities were long dismissed as exaggeration.
Q 18Why does the Amazon, the so-called 'lungs of the Earth', add almost no net oxygen?
Its own life consumes it
Its own life consumes it: the trees themselves breathe in a little over half the oxygen they make, and microbes rotting the forest's dead wood and leaves use up the rest.
Q 19Scientists warn that clearing 20 to 25% of the Amazon could tip much of the forest into what?
Savanna
Savanna would spread because the forest recycles its own rain: past that point the eastern and southern Amazon would dry out and degrade into scrubby grassland, two leading scientists warned in 2018.
Q 20The Daintree Rainforest, among the oldest rainforests on Earth, is in which country?
Australia
Australia's Daintree is a relic of the forests that covered the ancient supercontinent Gondwana, and it runs right down to white beaches fringed by coral reefs.
Central Africa's forest peoples hunt in different ways: the Efe stalk small game with bows and arrows, while Mbuti bands catch theirs in long nets strung through the Ituri forest.
Q 24Which snake, the world's heaviest, hunts in Amazon rivers and swamps?
Green anaconda
Green anaconda bites carry no venom: the snake is a boa that waits in the water, seizes prey that comes to drink, coils around it until it suffocates and swallows it whole.
Q 25The grooved hair of a sloth's coat hosts what, giving the animal a greenish camouflage?
Symbiotic algae
Symbiotic algae thrive on nitrogen from moths living in the fur, and the sloth eats the algae; when a three-toed sloth climbs down about once a week to defecate, the moths lay their eggs in its dung.
Q 26The dazzling colours of poison dart frogs serve mainly to do what?
Warn predators off
Warn predators off: the colours advertise toxic skin, yet despite the family's name only a handful of species, all from one genus, were ever used to poison blowgun darts.
Q 27Why are golden poison frogs, among Earth's most toxic animals, harmless when bred in captivity?
Their poison comes from wild prey
Their poison comes from wild prey, scientists believe: frogs raised on ordinary feeder insects never develop it, while one wild frog carries enough to kill ten or more people.
Q 28The harpy eagle, a giant raptor of the Amazon canopy, feeds mainly on which animals?
Sloths and monkeys
Sloths and monkeys make up most of its diet: the eagle snatches them from the branches in its huge talons and is strong enough to fly off carrying a full-grown sloth.
Q 29Wild orangutans are native to which two islands?
Borneo and Sumatra
Borneo and Sumatra are the only places wild orangutans survive, and almost every night each one weaves a fresh sleeping platform high in the trees from bent branches and leaves.
Q 30The rainforest-dwelling okapi, striped like a zebra on its legs, is most closely related to which animal?
The giraffe
The giraffe is the okapi's closest living relative, yet the animal stayed unknown to science until 1901, when explorer Harry Johnston sent home strips of its striped hide and, later, a skull.