Can you eat pineapple leaves and how do our taste buds work? The kids’ quiz

1. William, 8, asks: are pineapple leaves edible?

   1. No, they’re too spiky

   2. Eating them isn’t recommended, and the raw ones can poison you

   3. No, pineapples will grow in your stomach!

   4. Pineapples don’t have any leaves

2. Bethan, 6, asks: how do taste buds work?

   1. Taste buds only detect strong flavours – the others are made up by your brain

   2. They’re a myth – the tongue does the tasting

   3. Taste buds detect the chemicals in foods and send the taste to your brain

   4. Taste buds are like little fingertips that feel the shape of the food and guess what it would taste like

3. Blake, 4, asks: why are pancakes called pancakes?

   1. It comes from a Viking word meaning “flat food”

   2. They are cake batter that is cooked in a pan

   3. They used to be eaten when the pancreas ached

   4. In the Peter Pan story, Peter flattens all of Captain Hook’s cakes

4. Hayes, 10, asks: where and when did Advent calendars originate?

   1. 14th-century Greece

   2. 19th-century Germany

   3. 20th-century America

   4. 21st-century Spain

5. Seth, 7, asks: how long have hamsters been around?

   1. Since the ancient Greeks

   2. They weren’t discovered until the 1960s

   3. Hamsters were around before the dinosaurs!

   4. The first documentation of hamsters was in 1797

Solutions

1:B - Pineapple leaves are not recommended for eating. In some cultures they are boiled into a tea or made into juice, but eating them raw would be very unenjoyable and potentially unsafe., 2:C - Thousands of tiny taste buds on your tongue come into contact with the chemicals in food in your mouth. These chemicals activate your taste buds to send a specific message to the brain on how it tastes., 3:B - The simple answer is that they are pancakes because they are cakes that can be cooked in a pan!, 4:B - In the 19th century, German Lutherans counted down the days to Christmas by marking lines with chalk on doors and rubbing one off every day. The first Advent calendar to be printed and sold is thought to date from 1908, in Germany. , 5:D - Hamsters were first written about in 1797, by Alexander and Patrick Russell. Then in the 1930s some hamsters were captured for medical research in laboratories around the world. It wasn’t until the 1950s that they started to be kept as pets in the UK.

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.