So Little Time Quiz | Human Body

Quiz Answer Key and Fun Facts

1. If you take a minute to do this quiz, your heart beats approximately 70 times. Heart rate varies with age and fitness level. Which of these will usually have the highest resting heart rate?

Answer: Baby

Children from the age of 12 months and adults typically have a resting heart rate of between 60 and 140 beats per minute depending on their activity level. Babies have higher rates, around 100-160 bpm. A superfit athlete may have a much lower resting heart rate, 40-60 bpm.

2. In the minute it could take you to do this quiz, your body makes about 300 million new red blood cells. Where are new red blood cells made?

Answer: Bones

Red blood cells are made in the bone marrow of the skull, spine, ribs and pelvis. In a drop of blood from a pinprick there would be about 5 million red blood cells so they are very tiny. In numbers, they make up about a quarter of the cells in the human body. In that same minute, a red blood cell could travel round the body three times.

3. Puzzling over this quiz for sixty seconds would involve lots of messages travelling along nerve axons at a speed which could reach 7 kilometres (about 5 miles) a minute. Which of these is NOT a part of a nerve cell?

Answer: Axle

A typical nerve cell consists of a cell body which looks a bit like a tree with lots of branches called "dendrites" which detect changes in temperature, vibrations, light, chemicals or pressure. Information about these changes is converted into an electrical signal which passes very quickly along a very thin filament called an axon to another nerve cell including those in the brain and spinal cord.

In humans, the axons in nerve cells passing messages from the legs to the spinal cord can be a metre long.

4. You may be sitting down for a minute to take this quiz but your blood is continuing to flow around your body. In which of these blood vessels does blood flow the fastest?

Answer: Arteries

The blood in arteries is being pumped by the heart so it can travel further in a minute than the blood draining back to the heart through the veins. Capillaries are so narrow that red blood cells must flow in "single file" which slows them down. A venule is a narrow blood vessel which links the capillaries to a vein.

5. Even at rest, your body needs energy. You convert about 4 kJ (kiloJoules or 1 kcal) of food energy every minute. Which of these foods provides most energy gram for gram?

Answer: Corn flakes

There are approximately 4 kJ in a kcal (kilocalorie). The actual daily amount of food energy an individual needs varies widely, depending on age, sex, weight, height and activity. If you did nothing except quizzes and sleep, at this rate you would need just 6500 kJ or 1500 kcal per day (the equivalent of a 500g tub of Haagen-Dazs Ice cream).

A gram of corn flakes contains about 37 calories; wholemeal bread about 22 calories; boiled pasta about 11 calories and boiled rice about 14 calories.

6. In the sixty seconds you could spend on this quiz, the blood passing through your lungs has been absorbing about 200 ml of oxygen. What is the name of structures where gas exchange takes place?

Answer: Alveoli

In mammals, the alveoli (very small globular air sacs) are the site of gas exchange. There are about 300 million of them in each human lung and they consist of elastic fibres which stretch when air is breathed in and contract when it is expelled. Oxygen passes from the air through a thin membrane into a network of capillaries into the blood. Carbon dioxide, a waste product of cellular respiration, passes in the opposite direction and is breathed out.

7. If you happened to cough in the minute you have been taking this quiz, the expelled air might have reached a top speed of 1700 metres a minute (approximately 60 miles per hour). Which of these gases in the air is not involved in cellular respiration?

Answer: Nitrogen

The speed of a cough is notoriously difficult to measure but it is of interest to scientists concerned about the transmission of infectious diseases. A study by Jean Herzberg in 2005 used "particle image velocimetry" involving stage fog in an enclosure to track the patterns made by aerosols coughed out by 29 subjects.

The maximum speed recorded was 28.8 metres per second which is just over 1.7 kilometres a minute. Put simply, cellular respiration is a set of processes which releases energy from nutrients using the oxygen present in blood. Carbon dioxide and water are the final products of the reactions.

8. While you have been taking this quiz, your organs have been using energy. The brain uses about six times as much energy as the heart.

Answer: True

In one minute, the brain uses the energy released from about 60 milligrams of glucose compared to the heart which uses the energy from about 10 milligrams. It also uses 40 milligrams of oxygen during cellular respiration. The brain typically uses about one fifth of all the body's energy.

9. In the minute you have been doing this quiz, your body has been removing (excreting) unwanted and waste materials. Which of these organs is NOT an organ of excretion?

Answer: Liver

The liver is a large organ which acts as a chemical factory, converting substances supplied in the blood into useful foods for the cells and rendering harmless those substances which would be damaging to the body. The blood leaks out into large cells called hepatocytes where macrophages (a type of white blood cell) destroy the unwanted substances. The liver is the only human organ which can regenerate.

Kidneys filter about 25 millilitres of blood in a minute; the lungs excrete about 175 millilitres of carbon dioxide and it would take you about 1000 minutes to shed a gram of skin cells.

10. Over the past minute, parts of your body have been increasing in length. Which of these parts of the body grew the most?

Answer: Hair

In a minute your hair grows about one five thousandth of a millimetre; your finger and toenails grow at about half that rate; your whole body would have lost and replaced about one thousandth of a gram of bone and in an adult the thigh bone would not have grown at all.

Source: Author bucknallbabe

This quiz was reviewed by FunTrivia editor crisw before going online.
Any errors found in FunTrivia content are routinely corrected through our feedback system.

So Little Time Trivia Quiz

One minute really isn't very much time at all, but what your body can do in just sixty seconds is quite amazing. Take a minute to take this quiz and find out what else you were doing at the same time!

NEXT>

NEXT>

NEXT>

NEXT>

NEXT>

NEXT>

NEXT>

NEXT>

NEXT>