Vitamin C
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40 free Vitamin C trivia questions with answers — science & nature quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Vitamin C is the nutrient most people link with oranges and winter colds, but its story is stranger than that. For centuries a shortage of it was the deadliest hazard of life at sea, and the hunt for a cure produced an early landmark in medical testing, a string of odd shipboard remedies and a nickname that still sticks to the British. This quiz turns the best of those stories into fun facts you can play through. It covers what the vitamin does in the body, why humans have to eat it when most animals do not, which fruits and vegetables carry the most, and what cooking does to it. Other questions follow the explorers who lost crews to scurvy, the scientists who finally identified the vitamin in the twentieth century, and the surprising jobs it does today outside the body. The questions are written for curious players of any age, so children working on a school project and adults who enjoy a good quiz-night fact should both find something new. Every answer comes with a short explanation.
30 of 40 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which popular pet rodent, like humans, cannot make its own vitamin C and can develop scurvy without fresh vegetables?
Guinea pig
The guinea pig gave science its first lab model of scurvy in 1907, when two Norwegian doctors fed the animals only grains and flour. Most other rodents make their own vitamin C.
Q 02British sailors earned which nickname from a Royal Navy ration meant to keep scurvy away?
Limeys
Limeys began as 'lime-juicers' in the 1850s. The navy had swapped lemons for a fruit from its Caribbean colonies, unaware that it holds only about half as much vitamin C.
Q 03Cooks squeeze lemon juice, a natural source of vitamin C, over sliced apples to slow which unappetizing change?
Browning
Browning begins when enzymes in the cut fruit meet oxygen in the air. Vitamin C is one of the compounds food makers add to sliced produce to hold that reaction back.
Q 04Scurvy, the disease caused by a lack of vitamin C, famously attacks which part of the mouth?
Gums
Gums can swell until they grow over the teeth, as a chronicler of Magellan's voyage around the world recorded. Sufferers then struggle to eat at all.
Q 05Captain Cook took which sour German staple on his Pacific voyages to protect his crew from scurvy?
Sauerkraut
Sauerkraut keeps its vitamin C as long as it is not cooked, so it was one of the few preserved foods that could protect a crew on a long voyage.
Q 06In advanced scurvy, what gruesome thing can happen to old wounds that had long since healed?
They reopen
They reopen because scar tissue needs constant upkeep, and without vitamin C the body cannot maintain it. Bones that had knitted after a break can come apart again too.
Q 07Which animals carry the same broken gene that stops humans from making their own vitamin C?
Monkeys and apes
Monkeys and apes lost the gene's function with our shared ancestors, soon after the first primates appeared. Lemurs and other wet-nosed primates kept theirs.
Q 08Which American chemist, winner of two Nobel Prizes, urged the public to take huge daily doses of vitamin C?
Linus Pauling
Linus Pauling's 1970 book Vitamin C and the Common Cold set off a craze for megadoses. Later trials found that regular supplements do not stop people catching colds.
Q 09To prevent scurvy, the Royal Navy long mixed citrus juice into sailors' daily ration of which watered-down spirit?
Rum
Rum diluted with water was known as grog. An 1867 law went on to require British ships to give every sailor a daily ration of the juice.
Q 10Which crunchy salad vegetable, once ripened to red, holds more than twice an orange's vitamin C by weight?
Bell pepper
Bell pepper in its red form supplies 158% of the daily value of vitamin C per 100 g, against 59% for orange flesh. Green ones hold less.
Q 11Which Australian bush fruit can hold around fifty times more vitamin C than an orange, gram for gram?
Kakadu plum
Kakadu plum has been measured at up to 5,300 mg of vitamin C per 100 g, among the highest of any natural source. It has been a traditional bush food and medicine for centuries.
Q 12Inuit traditionally got vitamin C without fruit partly by eating muktuk, the raw skin and blubber of which animal?
Whale
Whale skin eaten raw holds up to 38 mg of vitamin C per 100 g. Muktuk is usually cut from the bowhead, though beluga and narwhal are used as well.
Q 13Eating vitamin C with a meal helps the body absorb more of which mineral, whose shortage causes anemia?
Iron
Q 21Which Scottish naval surgeon ran a 1747 shipboard experiment showing that citrus fruit could cure scurvy?
James Lind
James Lind gave twelve sick sailors different remedies aboard HMS Salisbury, and those fed oranges and lemons fared best. It ranks among the first controlled clinical trials.
Q 22Which ancient Greek physician described scurvy's symptoms more than 2,000 years ago?
Hippocrates
Hippocrates wrote of the illness long before anyone knew a missing nutrient caused it. Pliny the Elder later described sailors eating sea kale to keep it away.
Q 23In wartime Britain, with oranges scarce, which wild hedgerow fruit was collected to make vitamin C syrup?
Rose hips
Iron is absorbed more easily because vitamin C donates electrons that keep the metal in the form the gut takes up best.
Q 14In most mammals, which organ makes all the vitamin C the animal needs, so no fruit is required?
Liver
The liver does the job in cats, dogs and cows, so none of them ever needs fruit. Reptiles make theirs in the kidneys instead.
Q 15Most species of which nocturnal mammals have lost the ability to make their own vitamin C, just as humans have?
Bats
Bats lost the vitamin C enzyme on their own, one of several times the same ability has vanished in evolution. Some fish and songbirds lost it too.
Q 16Which fuzzy-skinned fruit, renamed by New Zealand exporters in 1959, supplies a full day's vitamin C in 100 grams?
Kiwifruit
Kiwifruit gives 103% of the daily value of vitamin C per 100 g, and gold varieties give even more. Exporters dropped its old name, which had linked it to the gooseberry.
Q 17Vitamin C is essential for making which structural protein found in scar tissue, cartilage and blood vessels?
Collagen
Collagen fibers need vitamin C to twist into their triple helix. Without it the body's connective tissue weakens, which is why scurvy brings bruising and bleeding.
Q 18Which chemical name for vitamin C was coined in the 1930s to honor its power against scurvy?
Ascorbic acid
Ascorbic acid joins a-, meaning 'without', to the root of scorbutus, the medical name for scurvy. Its discoverer had first called the substance hexuronic acid.
Q 19Because vitamin C dissolves in water, the body quickly gets rid of any excess mainly through what?
Urine
Urine carries surplus vitamin C out of the blood rapidly, which is why even very large doses rarely poison anyone.
Q 20A Nobel-winning scientist found in the 1930s that vitamin C could be extracted in bulk from which red spice?
Paprika
Paprika is a staple of Hungarian cooking, and it gave Albert Szent-Györgyi far more vitamin C than animal tissue had. He won the 1937 Nobel Prize in Medicine.
Rose hips hold about 426 mg of vitamin C per 100 g, several times the level in an orange. German submarine attacks on cargo ships had cut off imported fruit.
Q 24Magellan and his officers probably escaped scurvy on the Pacific crossing thanks to a preserve made from which fruit?
Quince
Quince paste was a delicacy reserved for the captains, and it happened to contain vitamin C. Most of the ordinary crew showed symptoms of scurvy.
Q 25In 1536 Iroquoians saved Jacques Cartier's scurvy-stricken men with a tea brewed from which part of a conifer?
Needles
Needles of the tree, thought to be eastern white cedar, made a tea later shown to contain 50 mg of vitamin C per 100 grams. No such remedy was available at sea.
Q 26Which large South American grazing animal, popular in zoos, develops scurvy unless its food includes vitamin C?
Capybara
Capybara are the world's largest living rodents, and captive ones that go without vitamin C have shown the telltale mouth disease of scurvy.
Q 27US nutrition experts estimate that which group of people needs 35 mg more vitamin C a day than everyone else?
Smokers
Smokers have lower levels of vitamin C in their blood, because the damage done by inhaled smoke uses the vitamin up. Secondhand smoke has the same effect.
Q 28Vitamin C neutralizes harmful free radicals before they damage the body's tissues, a job that earns it which label?
Antioxidant
Antioxidant molecules such as vitamin C hand over electrons to reactive compounds, disarming them. Food makers add the vitamin to products as a preservative for the same reason.
Q 29Scurvy, once endemic in Scotland, all but vanished there by 1800 after the arrival of which crop from the Americas?
Potato
Potato crops failing in Ireland's Great Famine of 1845 brought scurvy back, a sign of how much vitamin C the humble tuber had been supplying.
Q 30Swallowing more than two or three grams of vitamin C at once most often brings on which unpleasant side effect?
Diarrhea
Diarrhea is the common threshold side effect of megadoses, often with cramps and nausea. It is why US guidelines set an adult upper limit of 2,000 mg a day.