A Long Walk to Water Trivia
0Loading crowd target
0Loading crowd target
6correct to beat the crowd
89 free A Long Walk to Water trivia questions with answers — literature quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
A Long Walk to Water is a short novel most readers meet in a middle-grade classroom, and it sticks: two children in southern Sudan, a generation apart, one walking away from war and one walking for water every day. Linda Sue Park built it from the real life of Salva Dut, and the ending, where the two stories finally touch, is the kind teachers read aloud twice. The quiz covers the plot and its structure, the characters and what happens to them, the author and how the book came to be, and the history it rests on: the Lost Boys, the Dinka and the people of Nya's village, the war that split Sudan, and the charity Salva founded to drill for clean water. It suits students reading the novel, teachers building a reading guide, book clubs, and anyone who finished the book and wants to know how much of it really happened.
30 of 89 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01The 'Lost Boys' label for displaced Sudanese children may derive from which classic children's story?
Peter Pan
Peter Pan is the likely origin: aid workers in the refugee camps borrowed Barrie's name for his band of parentless boys, and Salva becomes one of them early in the novel.
Q 02Before it became a novel, Salva's story first appeared in what form, illustrated by Jim Averbeck?
A newspaper serial
A newspaper serial, drawn by Jim Averbeck, was the story's original form; Park now recommends Averbeck for classroom visits about the book because he knows Salva's story so well.
Q 03What food does an old Dinka woman give the exhausted Salva after the first group leaves him behind?
Peanuts
Peanuts from an old Dinka woman keep Salva going after the first group abandons him as too small to keep up; he then finds new travellers and a friend named Marial.
Q 04Salva's father needed surgery for which waterborne parasite, the news that set Salva drilling wells?
Guinea worm
Guinea worm had infected his father after years of drinking stagnant water, and it was this news that pushed Salva to found Water for South Sudan.
Q 05The title of A Long Walk to Water recalls the autobiography of which African leader?
Nelson Mandela
Nelson Mandela called his memoir Long Walk to Freedom, and Booklist's starred review suggested that teachers point out the allusion in Park's title.
Q 06Salva was resettled in which US city, now home to both Linda Sue Park and Water for South Sudan?
Rochester, New York
Rochester, New York took Salva in through a host family, and it is where he later founded Water for South Sudan and where Park, who would tell his story, lives.
Q 07What is Salva doing when gunfire breaks out at the start of A Long Walk to Water?
Sitting in class
Sitting in class, daydreaming about the walk home, when the shooting starts; the teacher sends the boys running into the bush, away from the village, and Salva is cut off from his family.
Q 08Nya, whose village finally gets a well, belongs to which ethnic group, long at odds with Salva's Dinka?
Nuer
Nuer is Nya's people, and their history of conflict with the Dinka is why she is puzzled, at the end, that a Dinka man led the crew that brought her village water.
Q 09What takes Salva's friend Marial in the night as the exhausted walkers sleep?
A lion
A lion is blamed: Salva wakes to find his only friend gone, and after this loss and another soon after, he resolves to keep walking on his own strength.
Q 10Salva spends six years in which Ethiopian refugee camp before soldiers force everyone out?
Itang
Itang held Salva from age eleven to seventeen; when Ethiopia's government fell in 1991, soldiers emptied the camp and drove its people toward a river.
Q 11Forced out of Ethiopia, Salva's group must cross which crocodile-filled river to get back into Sudan?
Gilo
Gilo is the river soldiers drove the refugees into at gunpoint in the rainy season; Salva made it across, but many others were shot, drowned or taken by crocodiles.
Q 12Driven out of Ethiopia, the Lost Boys trekked to which UNHCR camp in Kenya's Turkana County?
Kakuma
Kakuma was so isolated that it felt to Salva like a prison, and he later moved on to a second Kenyan camp, Ifo, before his name came up for America.
Q 13In the Kenyan camps, an aid worker named Michael teaches Salva English and which sport?
Volleyball
Volleyball came with the lessons; Michael's English is what lets Salva cope when he is chosen for America, where he joins a local team.
Q 21A Long Walk to Water won a 2011 children's book award named for which Nobel Peace Prize-winning reformer?
Jane Addams
Jane Addams gives her name to an award for children's books that promote peace, social justice and equality, a natural fit for a novel in which a refugee brings water to his old enemies.
Q 22What does a clinic nurse tell Nya's family to do with their drinking water?
Boil it
Boil it, the nurse says, yet Nya knows the advice is almost useless: the family can gather so little water that it would boil away before anyone could drink it.
Q 23How does Salva, living in America, learn his father is alive?
An email
Q 14Nya spends eight hours a day, seven months a year, fetching water from what kind of source?
A pond
A pond is all there is for seven months of the year; when it dries up, the family must leave home and camp beside a big lake far away.
Q 15Nya's younger sister, carried home on the walk in Park's picture book, is named what?
Akeer
Akeer is the little sister whose illness from unsafe water shows why the well matters; Park's 2019 picture book Nya's Long Walk retells the day Nya carried her home.
Q 16When the well is finished, what is built beside it that leaves Nya overjoyed?
A school
A school rises next to the well because the children no longer spend their days hauling water, the novel's closing argument that clean water buys time.
Q 17Nya thinks the drilling rig that arrives in her village looks like an iron what?
Giraffe
Giraffe: "iron giraffe" is how the big drill looks to Nya, and the charity behind the well now runs a fundraising contest called the Iron Giraffe Challenge.
Q 18Nya's half of A Long Walk to Water is invented; what did Park build it from?
Travellers' interviews and photos
Travellers' interviews and photos gave Park the details of Nya's village: she questioned people who had watched wells being drilled and studied their pictures and videos.
Q 19In the year A Long Walk to Water appeared, Linda Sue Park also wrote Storm Warning for which series?
The 39 Clues
The 39 Clues passes from author to author: Rick Riordan wrote the first book, and Park took the ninth.
Q 20Which relative, a former soldier with a gun, leads Salva's group until armed men shoot him dead?
His uncle
His uncle Jewiir gets the boy across the desert by naming one landmark at a time, a bush, then a rock, as the only goal; he is killed before they reach the refugee camp.
An email from a cousin in Zimbabwe says his father is in a United Nations clinic, and it takes Salva months to arrange the journey to see him.
Q 24What tells Nya whether a stranger is Dinka or one of her own?
Scar patterns
Scar patterns are how the two peoples, who look much alike, are told apart; early in the novel Salva reads an old woman's scars the same way and is relieved to find her Dinka.
Q 25On his first flight, bound for America, which drink does Salva sip that brings back a memory of home?
Coca-Cola
Coca-Cola, offered by a flight attendant, reminds him of a bottle once shared with his family; it is one small familiar thing on a journey of three planes into a land of snow.
Q 26Water for South Sudan's crews can drill only during which part of the year?
The dry season
The dry season, starting each December, is when the teams work; a new well takes them only days to finish and then pumps about 1,800 gallons a day.
Q 27What do Salva's group cut and bind into boats to cross the Nile?
Reeds
Reeds, cut in a hurry because no one knows how close the fighting is, are bound into small canoes that carry the whole group across the river.
Q 28Who paid for the new well in Nya's village, as the chief announces when it opens?
An American school
An American school: the chief announces that the well is named for Elm Street School, whose students raised the money that paid for the drilling.
Q 29Roughly how many boys are estimated to have fled southern Sudan on foot as the Lost Boys?
About 20,000
About 20,000 boys made the journey, often walking for weeks or even two years or more, many with nothing but the clothes they wore.
Q 30What animal does Salva's starving group shoot and cook, a meal so rich that it makes him sick?
An antelope
An antelope: after weeks of near starvation the feast is too much for Salva, who spends the night vomiting and finds that he is far from the only one.