Quizzes on the living world — record-breaking animals, birds and their dinosaur ancestry, plant survival, and life in the deep sea.
The living world is stranger than any invented one. An octopus runs on three hearts, the fastest animal on the planet is a bird in a dive rather than anything on four legs, and the reefs that shelter a quarter of marine species are built by animals barely visible on their own. These quizzes cover animals and their records, birds and the dinosaur lineage they never quite left, how plants feed and survive a winter, the physics and inhabitants of the ocean, and the cell biology sitting under all of it. Written for curiosity rather than exams — the explanations are where most of the learning happens.
Gaggles, mobs, cobs and kids: ten questions on what we call animals in groups and on their own.
What is a group of geese on the ground called?
Electric fields, infrared pits, polarised light and infrasound: ten senses that no human has.
How do most insect-eating bats locate prey in the dark?
Ten questions on the animals that do the hunting, from cheetah claws to what actually holds a wolf pack together.
Which is the largest of the big cats?
The biggest, the fastest and the genuinely strange.
Which vertebrate is believed to have the longest lifespan?
Beetles, woodlice, coral polyps and spider silk: ten questions on the animals without a backbone.
Which of these is not an insect?
From the inside of a cell to the logic of natural selection.
What is generally considered the basic unit of life?
Who eats whom, what happens to the energy along the way, and why removing one species can change everything.
What is an organism that breaks down dead material called?
How the mechanism actually works, what it acts on, and the evidence that convinced biologists it does.
On which ship did Charles Darwin make the voyage that shaped his thinking?
Base pairs, codons, alleles and the arithmetic of what gets passed on — ten harder questions on genetics.
In DNA, which base always pairs with adenine?
Ten questions on the machinery packed inside a single cell, from ribosomes to the membrane that holds it together.
Which cell structure assembles proteins from amino acids?
Ten bills, tongues and stomachs, and the food each of them evolved to handle.
A flamingo feeds by doing what?
Record holders, adaptations and the dinosaur connection.
What is the largest living bird species?
Brood patches, egg tricks and the birds that hand the whole job to one parent.
A bird that hatches covered in down and able to walk almost at once is described as what?
How a reef is built, what keeps it alive, and the animals that quietly run the place.
The single-celled algae that live inside coral tissue are known as what?
Ten questions on how seawater moves around the planet and what the ground beneath it actually looks like.
Spring tides, the largest tides of the month, happen when what occurs?
Bioluminescence, vent communities and the slow economy of a world without sunlight.
Which name is given to the ocean layer below roughly 1,000 metres, where sunlight never…
Whales, seals, sirenians and otters, and the equipment each one needed to leave the land.
Baleen whales feed by doing what?
The physics of the sea and the life that adapted to it.
What is the deepest known point in the ocean?
Ten questions on the mammals that went back to the water and how they eat, dive, sing and sleep.
How does a baleen whale feed?
Mulch, pH, grafting and hardening off — the reasoning behind the repeated jobs.
What does mulching a bed with bark or compost mainly achieve?
How plants feed, reproduce and survive the year.
Plants produce their own food through which process?
Rings, heartwood, fungal partners and the physics of lifting water thirty metres.
What do the rings visible in a cut tree trunk record?
The giants that ruled the Earth for 165 million years — and the day it all changed.
Roughly when did the last non-bird dinosaurs go extinct?
The building blocks of everything, and the table that organises them.
What is the chemical symbol for gold?
Record-breakers, oddities and the rules that sort the living world.
What is the largest animal ever known to have lived?
The remarkable machine you live in, from your bones to your immune system.
What is the largest organ of the human body?
Three pounds of tissue, eighty-six billion neurons, and the most complex object we know of.
Which is the largest part of the brain, responsible for thought and voluntary movement?
A friendly tour of the planets, moons and the star at the middle of it all.
Which planet is closest to the Sun?
Clouds, fronts, storms and the difference between a rainy day and a warming world.
In which layer of the atmosphere does nearly all weather occur?