Quiz: Saccharomyces cerevisiae

About this quiz

Twenty statements about Saccharomyces cerevisiae, the yeast behind bread, beer and wine. Each round draws ten from the bank, so two games in a row will rarely bring the same ones.

How to play

• You decide whether each statement is true or false. You get 15 seconds per question.
• A correct answer is worth 100 points, plus a speed bonus of up to 100 for answering instantly.
• Correct answers in a row raise the combo: +0.1 to the multiplier each, up to ×2. One miss resets it to zero.
• Right or wrong, every question is followed by the explanation: you can play the quiz knowing nothing and come out knowing something.

What it covers

The twenty questions run from history to biotechnology: Egyptians fermenting without knowing why, and Pasteur proving a living thing was behind it; what yeast is on the inside — single-celled, how it reproduces, what its wall is made of, what its vacuoles are for —; how it takes glucose in and what it does with it, alcoholic fermentation and where the CO₂ that makes beer fizz comes from; why it is a facultative anaerobe and what changes when oxygen shows up; and how it ended up the first eukaryote to have its genome sequenced and is used today to make human insulin, vaccines and biofuels.

The questions come from The Organism That Turned Sugar Into Civilization, which also carries a couple of dozen supporting papers and documents.