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

Question 1

What is the name for the silent gap between catching an infection and showing the first symptoms, which can last a day or two for a cold, a couple of weeks for chickenpox, or months to years for rabies and the AIDS virus, and during which a person may already be passing it on?

Question 2

What is the name for the shielding of the unprotected members of a community that comes into effect once a large enough share of the population is immune that a spreading germ can no longer find the steady supply of new hosts it needs to keep going?

Question 3

Which single-celled organism has no fixed shape, oozing along and feeding by pushing out finger-like flows of itself to surround and swallow its prey, and bailing out excess water through a slowly filling bubble?

Question 4

Which bacterial disease, carried by the fleas of rats and other rodents, caused the Black Death and later pandemics, and had a vaccine developed against it by Waldemar Haffkine in Bombay in 1897, before a frightening outbreak hit the Indian city of Surat in 1994?

Question 5

What tough material, the same one that stiffens the shells of insects and crabs, makes up the cell walls of fungi, marking them off from plants, whose walls are built of cellulose, and showing that fungi are in fact closer kin to animals?

Question 6

Which fungus hatches from a half-buried, egg-like sac into a spongy stalk capped with a slimy, olive-brown, spore-filled head that smells strongly of rotting flesh, drawing flies that carry the spores away on their feet?

Question 7

What is the name for the growing problem in which bacteria evolve to survive the drugs that once killed them, fed by overuse in medicine and on farms, and producing hard-to-treat strains such as the hospital germ known by the initials MRSA?

📚 All Quizzes

Browse every category and see the full list of quizzes on BriskQuiz

→

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.