Why are bananas yellow, and what noise do giraffes make? Try our kids’ quiz

Illustration: Hennie Haworth/The Guardian

1. Betty, 10, asks why are bananas (like the ones pictured above) yellow?

   1. Because of all the sunshine where they grow

   2. Yellow is a colour monkeys can see easily and the tree wants its fruits to get eaten up to spread its seeds

   3. Because of a gas that ripens bananas from green to yellow, making them softer and sweeter and easier to eat

   4. They used to be red but botanists changed them to be yellow as yellow seemed more popular for snacks

2. Mika, 7, asks: how can you tell the difference between a male and female turtle?

   1. They look identical

   2. Females have a lighter shell

   3. Males have a longer tail

   4. Female turtles are faster swimmers

3. Amelia, 7, asks: what colour are the hottest stars in the universe?

   1. Blue

   2. White

   3. Orange and yellow

   4. Red

4. Benjamin, 7, asks: what noise do giraffes make?

   1. Giraffes don’t make any noises

   2. Giraffes can bark when they’re really annoyed

   3. They make a slobbering sound, a bit like the noise a camel makes

   4. They hum, but only at night

5. Ethan, 7, asks: how many people are there in the world?

   1. 5.5 billion

   2. 2.6 billion

   3. 7.9 billion

   4. 14 billion

Solutions

1:C - Bananas are delicious suitcases full of seeds: they taste good so animals will eat them and poop out the seeds to make new plants. At first, the skin is full of chlorophyll, which looks green, but a gas called ethylene ripens the banana and turns it yellow., 2:C - Once they are adults, male turtles have longer tails than females. They become male or female depending on the temperature of the sand they were incubated in as eggs: warm means more females; cooler, more males., 3:A - You can tell a star’s temperature from its colour. Red are coolest, yellow are hotter, white come next, then blue stars – just like a flame, the blue part is the hottest., 4:D - Giraffes like to hum! Experts at the University of Vienna recorded 947 hours of sounds from giraffes at three zoos. They found the main noise giraffes make is a hum, but only at night and at such a low frequency, we humans can only just hear it!, 5:C - There are around 7.9 billion people in the world, about a third of them in China and India; each has more than a billion people living there. More than 140 million people are born a year – slightly more boys than girls.

Scores

1. 5 and above.

2. 4 and above.

3. 3 and above.

4. 2 and above.

5. 0 and above.

6. 1 and above.

Molly Oldfield hosts Everything Under the Sun, a weekly podcast answering children’s questions, out now as a book.

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