World Water Day
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40 free World Water Day trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Every year the United Nations sets aside one day to remind the world that fresh water is finite. World Water Day grew out of a landmark environmental summit in the early 1990s, and each edition takes a new theme, from the value we place on water to who gets left behind when supplies run short. This quiz covers the day itself (when it falls, who created it and what its campaigns have asked of us) alongside the bigger story: where the planet's fresh water actually sits, which uses drain it fastest, the cities and lakes that came close to running dry, rivers shared between uneasy neighbours, and the engineers and doctors who made tap water safe to drink. It is written for classrooms, assemblies, workplace awareness days and anyone planning a World Water Day event. Every answer comes with a short explanation, so the questions double as ready-made talking points.
30 of 40 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which South African city counted down to 'Day Zero' in 2018, when its taps were due to be shut off?
Cape Town
Cape Town never reached Day Zero: residents cut their daily water use by more than half, and strong rains from June 2018 refilled the dams.
Q 02Which meat has the largest water footprint, averaging about 15,400 litres for every kilogram produced?
Beef
Beef takes more than three times as much water as the same weight of chicken. Across livestock farming, about 98 percent of the water goes into growing the animals' feed.
Q 03Which disease did physician John Snow trace to a contaminated water pump on London's Broad Street in 1854?
Cholera
Cholera was widely blamed on bad air, but Snow traced the deaths to the pump, and parish officials took off its handle the day after he made his case to them.
Q 04In Chile's Atacama Desert, large vertical mesh nets are strung up to harvest water from which natural source?
Fog
Fog droplets cling to the mesh and run down into a trough below. Namib Desert beetles pull off the same trick, drinking the water that condenses on their wings.
Q 05World Water Day falls exactly one month before Earth Day, on which date each year?
22 March
22 March was fixed by a United Nations vote in December 1992, and the first World Water Day was observed the following year.
Q 06Which Central Asian lake shrank to a tenth of its size after Soviet projects diverted the rivers feeding it?
Aral Sea
The Aral Sea lost the Amu Darya and Syr Darya to desert fields of cotton and rice. Its dried-out eastern basin is now called the Aralkum Desert.
Q 07Which Hollywood actor co-founded the charity Water.org with Gary White to offer families loans for household taps?
Matt Damon
Matt Damon has fronted the charity's adverts, including a Super Bowl spot. Its small loans let a family install a tap instead of paying a vendor or walking to fetch water.
Q 08Which sector takes about 70 percent of all the freshwater that people withdraw from rivers, lakes and aquifers?
Agriculture
Agriculture takes 69 percent of global withdrawals in the UN food agency's figures, against 19 percent for industry and 12 percent for towns and cities.
Q 09World Water Day 2025 called for the preservation of which shrinking natural stores of freshwater?
Glaciers
Glaciers were chosen because their meltwater supplies drinking water, farms, industry and clean energy far downstream.
Q 10Which Michigan city's 2014 switch to a local river supply let lead leach from ageing pipes into tap water?
Flint
Flint's new supply was never treated with corrosion inhibitors, so it ate into old lead pipes and exposed around 100,000 residents.
Q 11Which United Nations body passed the December 1992 resolution that created World Water Day?
General Assembly
The General Assembly named it the World Day for Water in resolution 47/193, and the first one was held just three months later.
Q 12Which country hosted the 1992 Earth Summit, where a yearly day devoted to fresh water was first proposed?
Brazil
Brazil staged the summit in Rio de Janeiro, where 108 heads of state and government turned up. The UN made the day official that December.
Q 13Which action plan adopted at the 1992 Earth Summit first proposed an international day for fresh water?
Agenda 21
Agenda 21 is a non-binding UN plan for sustainable development, and its number points to the 21st century it was written for.
Q 21Which Bolivian city erupted in a 'Water War' in 2000 after its privatised supply sharply raised bills?
Cochabamba
Cochabamba's protests forced the government to reverse the privatisation within months. The supply had been handed to a venture involving the US firm Bechtel.
Q 22Which country built the Renaissance Dam on the Blue Nile, alarming Egypt and Sudan further downstream?
Ethiopia
Ethiopia's dam is the largest hydroelectric plant in Africa, built to ease the country's acute power shortage and to sell electricity to its neighbours.
Q 23Which river system did India and Pakistan agree to divide in a 1960 treaty brokered by the World Bank?
The Indus
The Indus and two of its tributaries went to Pakistan and three eastern rivers to India, in a deal signed in Karachi by Nehru and Ayub Khan.
Q 14Which hidden resource did World Water Day 2022 spotlight under the theme 'Making the Invisible Visible'?
Groundwater
Groundwater makes up about 99 percent of the world's liquid fresh water, yet it is easy to overlook because it lies out of sight beneath our feet.
Q 15Which bird, hero of an old story about carrying drops to a great fire, fronted World Water Day 2023?
Hummingbird
Hummingbird was the emblem of the 2023 campaign, Be the Change, which asked people to do what they could about their own water use, however small.
Q 16Which Paris-based UN agency publishes the World Water Development Report, launched on World Water Day each year?
UNESCO
UNESCO produces the report through its World Water Assessment Programme, and each edition tackles the same theme as that year's campaign.
Q 17Which of the UN's Sustainable Development Goals promises clean water and sanitation for all by 2030?
SDG 6
SDG 6 is one of 17 global goals and has eight targets of its own. SDG 14, which sounds similar, covers life in the oceans instead.
Q 18Which UN observance on 19 November, also convened by UN-Water, draws attention to the global sanitation crisis?
World Toilet Day
World Toilet Day was begun in 2001 by a campaign group, the World Toilet Organization, and became an official UN day in 2013.
Q 19Which Nordic capital hosts World Water Week each summer and awards a prize nicknamed the Nobel of water?
Stockholm
Stockholm's prize is presented by Sweden's king, its patron, during the week-long conference.
Q 20Which Central Asian country co-hosted the UN 2023 Water Conference in New York alongside the Netherlands?
Tajikistan
Tajikistan shared the chair of the first UN water conference in a generation; the previous one had met back in 1977.
Q 24Which river flows through four national capitals, including Vienna and Budapest, more than any other in the world?
Danube
The Danube also passes Bratislava and Belgrade, and its basin drains parts of 19 countries on the way to the Black Sea.
Q 25Which US river, held back by the Hoover Dam at Lake Mead, has rarely reached the sea since the 1960s?
Colorado
The Colorado is used so heavily by farms and cities that its final stretch is usually dry. A planned release in 2014 let it touch the ocean for the first time in 16 years.
Q 26Which vast aquifer beneath the US Great Plains, spanning eight states, would need over 6,000 years to refill naturally?
Ogallala
The Ogallala yields about 30 percent of the well water pumped onto crops in the United States, and irrigation is draining it far faster than rain can refill it.
Q 27Which North African country's 'Great Man-Made River' pipes fossil water from under the Sahara to its coastal cities?
Libya
Libya's network supplies about 70 percent of the country's fresh water, and Muammar Gaddafi called it the Eighth Wonder of the World.
Q 28Which South Asian country's arsenic-tainted drinking wells caused one of the largest mass poisonings in history?
Bangladesh
Bangladesh had sunk millions of tube wells to give people a safe alternative to dirty surface water, but the wells were not tested for arsenic at the time.
Q 29Which water-scarce island country purifies its sewage into 'NEWater', used mostly by industry rather than homes?
Singapore
Singapore began studying recycling in the 1970s to cut its reliance on water piped in from Malaysia, long a sore point between the two.
Q 30Which continent holds more than half of all the fresh water on Earth, despite counting as a desert?
Antarctica
Antarctica's ice sheet covers 98 percent of the continent and is more than 2 km thick on average, yet so little snow falls there that it ranks as a desert.