Fungi, Microbes & the Unseen World Quiz — 7 Free Questions

Question 1

What is the name for the process by which one bacterium passes a small ring of DNA straight to another through a thin tube, even across different species, spreading useful genes, above all those for resisting antibiotics, through a population far faster than mutation could?

Question 2

What is the name for the set of chemical changes, mostly carried out without oxygen by yeasts and bacteria drawing energy from sugar, that people harness to raise bread, brew beer and wine, sour milk into yoghurt and cheese, and preserve cabbage, fish and soybeans?

Question 3

What is the name for the group of protists, including the slipper animalcule and the trumpet-shaped Stentor, that move and feed with many short beating hairs and are unique in carrying two kinds of nucleus, a large one that runs the cell and a small one kept for reproduction?

Question 4

What is the name for the smallest known agent of infectious disease, a bare, tiny ring of RNA with no protein coat and no genes for making any protein, that nonetheless causes several serious crop diseases, including one that has devastated coconut palms in the Philippines?

Question 5

What is the name for a disease that has passed to humans from other animals, a category that covers roughly six in ten known human infections and three in four newly emerging ones, among them the AIDS virus from chimpanzees, influenza from birds and plague from rodents?

Question 6

Which viral disease, spread mainly by contaminated water and able to paralyse or kill, has been pushed to the edge of eradication since a global campaign began in 1988, with cases down more than ninety-nine per cent and India, once the worst-affected country, certified free of it in 2014?

Question 7

What is the name for the animal species in which a germ normally lives without doing much harm, and from which it occasionally spills over into people: bats for rabies, Nipah and Marburg, rodents for hantavirus and plague, waterfowl for bird flu?

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About Fungi, Microbes & the Unseen World

This quiz is about the living things too small to see, and the fungi that link that world to ours: the fungal kingdom from mushrooms to moulds and yeasts, the bacteria and archaea, the viruses and stranger infectious agents, the single-celled protists and algae, and the pioneers, tools, ferments and gut communities that connect microbes to human life. One hundred questions in five packs, each describing an organism, a group, a structure, a process, a disease agent or a discovery and asking you to name it from four choices of the same kind, then explaining it. Marine plankton such as diatoms belong to the Fish & Sea Life quiz; this is a knowledge quiz, not a picture quiz.

The first pack is the fungal kingdom: the thread body and the mushroom, spores, yeast and mould, the lichen partnership, the fairy ring, the deadly death cap and the storybook fly agaric, the penicillin mould, the ant-hijacking Cordyceps, the truffle, wheat rust and potato blight, ergot and Dutch elm disease, bracket fungi and stinkhorns, the decomposer role, and the chitin that puts fungi closer to animals than to plants.

The second pack is bacteria and archaea: the no-nucleus cell, splitting in two, the spherical form, the Gram stain and the cell-wall mesh, the survival spore, the biofilm, the archaea and the extremophiles, the oxygen-making cyanobacteria, the nitrogen-fixing root bacterium, gene swapping and antibiotic resistance, the laboratory workhorse and the yoghurt bacteria, the gut community, the antibiotic-making soil microbe, the nitrogen cycle, glowing bacteria and quorum sensing.

The third pack is viruses and other infectious agents: what a virus is, its protein shell, the virus that eats bacteria, the backward-copying retrovirus, influenza and the common cold and the coronavirus, eradicated smallpox, the vaccine and herd immunity, the gene-free prion and the tiny viroid, the incubation period, the animal reservoir and spillover, polio, antiviral drugs, tuberculosis, plague and malaria.

The fourth pack is protists and the microbial menagerie: the leftover-group protist, the shapeshifting amoeba, the slipper and the ciliates, the half-plant euglena, the slime mould, the rolling colony Volvox, food-grade Spirulina, laboratory agar, the chalk-shelled forams, the red tide, the parasites Giardia, Trypanosoma and Toxoplasma, the fungus-like water moulds, a flagellum model alga, the dinoflagellates, pack-hunting myxobacteria, the deep rock biosphere and the Winogradsky column.

The fifth pack is people, tools and ferments: Leeuwenhoek, Pasteur and Koch, pasteurisation, Fleming and Jenner, the Petri dish and Koch's rules, the DNA-copying reaction and CRISPR, fermentation itself, yoghurt and idli-dosa batter, Japanese koji and the kombucha culture, probiotics and the stool transplant, the cow's rumen, the Great Oxidation Event and the bacterial origin of our cell powerhouses.

The wrong answers are always other organisms or terms of the same kind. About a quarter of the questions carry a neutral photograph of an agar plate, a microscope, lab glassware or a cut loaf, chosen because it names no organism and so cannot point to any option. Facts have been checked against standard reference works.