According to a quick search of the stat databases maintained by the world Food and Agriculture Organisation (www.FAO.org) world production of various major fruits was as follows:
By the way, all of these things pale into comparison with production levels of the major grain crops.
However, always a chance that your lecturer is being a smartaleck and the answer is something obscure like rosehips that aren’t really a commercial crop. (My horticulture lecturer used to ask what the world’s biggest horticultural crop was, bet no-one can guess the answer)
That was my thought as well. The Encyclopedia Americana calls lentils “seeds,” so they might not qualify. But it calls grains “seedlike fruit,” so it seems to be that they would qualify. Among the grains, maize was #1 in 2001.
maize 604 million tonnes
rice 585 million tonnes
wheat 576 million tonnes
In five of the last 11 years, maize has been #1. In 1995, 1999, and 2000, rice was #1. In 1992, 1993, and 1997 wheat was #1. The closeness of the top three would seem to be at odds with the teacher’s qualification that one tops “far exceeds” its nearest rival.
With that in mind, I went back throught the list at fao.org (click here then on the first link in the table, which is labeled “crops primary”). I found what I think might be the winner: oil palm fruit. The 2001 production was 118 million tonnes, more than tomatoes, grapes, oranges, or bananas. Watermelon also beat grapes and oranges, by the way.
I forgot to mention that soybeans beat palm oil fruit (177 million tonnes vs. 118), but I don’t think that counts as fruit, does it? What exactly is the fruit of the soybean plant, botanically speaking? I would guess the pod (including the beans inside), but IANABotanist.
I had to hand in the quiz today, which I did, and because I didn’t know the answer to that last question, I quickly asked my lecturer if rice was considered a fruit. Since we disected a wheat floret yesterday, and that was a grain, but botanically also a fruit, I was thinking perhaps the answer was rice.
Anyway, he said that rice could be looked at as a grain, like wheat.
From that, I figured I’d take a guess at rice, and handed it in. By the looks of Bib’s post, I might have been better off asking about maize… oh well.
I’ll post the answer here when I get the results, since you guys seemed interested.
YAY ! I won the quiz ! Out of over 100 people, too
O.K, I got the pumpkin, grapes and raspberry question only partly right. I was correct in that they are all monoecious, but the answer they wanted was that they were all berries, so apparently raspberry is a berry. I know that strawberry is not, so perhaps that was what the person who said they weren’t berries was thinking of ?
Oh, and “rice” was the correct answer to the question about the most produced fruit. A rice grain is botanically speaking a fruit, so there you go.
And the ancient greek.roman one was definitely basil.
I’m so stoked that I won ! I got a nice bottle of wine to celebrate my win with
I can post the rest of the questions if people would like to have a go at the whole quiz. I got almost all the answers from a quick google search, anyway and didn’t really use any botany knowledge. If you guys are interested, I’ll start a thread in MPSIMS, or IMHO (I’ll have to think about which it’s more suited for).
So for those who expressed interest in knowing the final answers, there they are. Thanks for your help, guys.
