World War Z

95 pages • 3 hours read

World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2006

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Introduction

Before Reading

During Reading

After Reading

During Reading

Reading Questions & Paired Texts

Reading Check and Short Answer Questions on key points are designed for guided reading assignments, in-class review, formative assessment, quizzes, and more.

INTRODUCTION-CHAPTER 12

Reading Check

1. How many people now live in Greater Chongqing?

2. When the narrator visits the village in the rainforest in Brazil, how does the narrator believe they have survived?

3. What is Phalanx?

4. In the first 12 chapters, how many were interviews with people from the United States, and what can be inferred from that?

Short Answer

Answer each question in at least 1 complete sentence. Incorporate details from the text to support your response.

1. Why does the narrator publish this version of the report?

2. Why does Nuri Televaldi finally leave smuggling?

3. How does the interview with Jacob Nyathi illustrate the chaos erupting around the world?

4. What are some examples of misinformation adding to the tragedy?

CHAPTERS 13-24

Reading Check

1. When Blaire describes the people trying to get away on I-80, what does he say happened?

2. Why does Maria Zhuganova believe the government carried out the program of decimation?

3. Ahmed Farahnakian recounts which two countries firing nuclear weapons at each other?

4. What was the German version of the Redeker Plan called?

Short Answer

Answer each question in at least 1 complete sentence. Incorporate details from the text to support your response.

1. How does Ajay Shah describe the scene at the shipyard he fled to during the panic, and what different motivations does he recognize?

2. What does the Redeker Plan involve, and why do many protest it?

3. Why does Jesika Hendricks blame the media?

4. When Sardar Kahn and Sargeant Mukharjee refuse to blow up the pass with refugees still on it, what is General Raj-Singh’s response?

Paired Resource

Interview with Al Gore

In this four-minute video, the BBC interviews Al Gore about climate change, including misinformation.
Theme connections include The Triumph of Humanity and The Power of Knowledge and the Cost of Ignorance.
How does the world response to the zombies connect with global warming?

“Zombie Movies and Political Fears: How Horror Films Reflect Anxieties of Our Time”

Teen Vogue discusses some history of zombie movies over the decades and what they reveal about society.
The article connects to the theme of The Power of Knowledge and the Cost of Ignorance.
While reflecting on The Zombie War, what does the narrator reveal about society?

CHAPTERS 25-38

Reading Check

1. What department was Arthur Sinclair, Junior in charge of?

2. How did Joe Muhammad volunteer to help the Neighborhood Security Teams?

3. Who are Quislings?

4. What work did Barati Palshagar perform for Radio Free Earth?

5. When he meets Kondo Tatsumi, what does Sensei Tomonaga Ijiro say the two of them were meant to do?

6. What dangers did those who stayed on the International Space Station face?

Short Answer

Answer each question in at least 1 complete sentence. Incorporate details from the text to support your response.

1. How does Roy Elliot fight ADS?

2. What questions are there about the woman who helped Christina Eliopolis survive after her plane went down?

3. At the end of his story, David Allen Forbes speaks of someone he calls “she.” Whom can the reader infer he is speaking about and what supports that inference?

4. What do people think happened to the people of North Korea?

5. Why did Kondo Tatsumi not realize his city was being overrun by zombies until they were at his door?

6. How did Americans and Cubans help each other?

Paired Resource

“Their Mom Died of COVID. They Say Conspiracy Theories Are What Really Killed Her”

NPR offers an article and 11-minute audio about a family torn apart by conspiracy theories.
Theme connections include The Power of Knowledge and the Cost of Ignorance.
How does Radio Free Earth try to combat misinformation and help people?

CHAPTERS 39-58

Reading Check

1. How does Todd Waino feel the day after the battle in Hope, New Mexico?

2. How many zombies does Master Chief Petty Officer Michael Choi estimate to be underwater?

3. When Jesika Hendricks hears a disrespectful DJ, what does she think?

4. Who does Jurgen Warmbrunn say the Zombie War affected?

Short Answer

Answer each question in at least 1 complete sentence. Incorporate details from the text to support your response.

1. Why does Andre Renard believe his experience in the war was the worst?

2. How did armed forces try to clear the entire United States of zombies?

3. How is Russia using women in the aftermath of the war?

4. What positive result from the war does Joe Muhammed recognize and what does he fear will happen?

Paired Resource

“Matt Hancock on Covid Vaccine: ‘Today Is a Triumph’”

This two-minute video shows the approval of a vaccine for Covid-19 to the House of Commons.
Theme connections include The Triumph of Humanity and The Power of Knowledge and the Cost of Ignorance.
How does developing the Covid vaccine relate to the characters’ fight against the zombies?

‘The Hill We Climb’ by Amanda Gorman

The Harvard Gazette includes the text of and some reactions to Amanda Gorman’s poem “The Hill We Climb.” This video from PBS provides a video version of Gorman presenting her poem at President Biden’s inauguration.
Theme connections include The Triumph of Humanity and American Exceptionalism.
What sections of the poem connect most with the novel?

Recommended Next Reads

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Shared themes include The Triumph of Humanity, The Power of Knowledge and the Cost of Ignorance, and American Exceptionalism.
Shared topics include zombies, history, politics, racism, violence, war, classism, and empowerment.
Dread Nation on SuperSummary

The Stand by Stephen King

After a biological weapon escapes a lab and decimates the American population, survivors unite to take a stand against the next evil.
Shared themes include The Triumph of Humanity, The Power of Knowledge and the Cost of Ignorance, and American Exceptionalism.
Shared topics include danger, violence, good and evil, politics, armed forces, working together, and tragedy.
The Stand on SuperSummary

Reading Questions Answer Key

INTRODUCTION-CHAPTER 12

Reading Check

1. Less than 50,000 people (Chapter 1)

2. The remote location or the people’s ability to fight (Chapter 4)

3. A drug that is sold as a vaccine but is really useless against the real threat of zombies (Chapter 10)

4. Three of the 12 interviews are with people in the United States, while other countries represented in these chapters have only one entry each. This decision reveals the importance placed on America in the report, building an idea of American Exceptionalism. (Chapters 1-12)

Short Answer

1. The narrator was told by the chairman of the United Nations that the report had too much emotion in it for a government report. The narrator believes including some emotion could help people learn from all that happened, so he published it as the unofficial report. (Introduction)

2. Televidi believes money will soon be worthless. He also witnesses some fearsome sights people endure when smuggling, culminating in a truck of wealthy passengers becoming zombies and endangering the driver. (Chapter 2)

3. Nyathi encounters gunshots and screams as he walks home from work. He tries to get to his family but cannot. After a zombie attacks him, he tries to help a woman he sees, but she attacks him in fear. He ends up shot by the police and in the hospital. (Chapter 5)

4. People are calling it African rabies, fueling racism and misinformation. Multiple governments cover up the truth, lying to people about what they have experienced. Leaders also ignore the Warmbrunn-Knight report, which had numerous experts’ testimonies and could have helped the world fight back. (Chapters 1-12)

CHAPTERS 13-24

Reading Check

1. There was a traffic jam with people sitting on top of vehicles and zombies coming through attacking people who could not escape. (Chapter 13)

2. To make soldiers more compliant, bound together by guilt (Chapter 15)

3. Pakistan and Iran (Chapter 18)

4. The Prochnow Plan (Chapter 21)

Short Answer

1. Shaw saw throngs of people trying to escape, boats overloaded, people in the water. Zombie threats were everywhere. He saw people take advantage of the situation, refusing to let certain people on board based on race, gender, etc., showing racist, sexist, and other shameful motivations. On the other hand, some people demonstrated immense compassion, risking their lives driving their boats back and forth to help as many as they could. (Chapter 14)

2. The Redeker Plan involves evacuating some people to a place that can be fortified and blowing up routes to the location, abandoning all other people, killing anyone in the way, and using those outside the safe zone as human bait. (Chapter 20)

3. Hendricks headed north with her family and many others. She noticed the media was not fully informing people, but rather was telling people to head north without a full plan or warning of how long they would need to stay in the north; thus, people were not prepared. (Chapter 23)

4. General Raj-Singh rushes back through the people, toward the zombies, to manually blow up the pass. He takes the burden onto himself. (Chapter 24)

CHAPTERS 25-38

Reading Check

1. Department of Strategic Resources, DeStRes (Chapter 25)

2. Patrolling for zombies (Chapter 27)

3. People who start acting like zombies (Chapter 27)

4. Interpreting, specializing in Indian languages (Chapter 31)

5. Help regrow Japan like gardeners (Chapter 34)

6. Lethal radiation, running out of supplies, possibly never going home (Chapter 37)

Short Answer

1. Elliot makes films to emphasize people fighting the zombies, like the 300 students who defeated thousands of zombies. The goal was to increase hope and decrease people giving up. (Chapter 28)

2. The woman was never found. Also, technicians discovered Eliopolis’s radio was not working the whole time she was speaking with the woman. Psychologists thought she might have been connecting her to her mother. Still, Eliopolis insisted Met was real. (Chapter 29)

3. Forbes was speaking about the queen. He talked about how she would not leave even though people tried to get her to. Presumably, people would try to protect royalty, and in staying the queen would project leadership and protect her people. (Chapter 30)

4. People believe those in North Korea went underground. Satellites show the population shrinking over time. They might still live in underground areas or they have all been turned into zombies. (Chapter 32)

5. Tatsumi rarely interacted in person with others, including his own parents, whom he lived with. He retreated into technology, so he did not realize the reality around him. (Chapter 33)

6. Cubans gave Americans a safe place to flee to. The Resettlement Centers were harsh. Eventually, people were allowed out and found a new home. Americans spread democratic ideas into Cuba, which gave people more freedoms. (Chapter 35)

CHAPTERS 39-58

Reading Check

1. Like they had reached “finally the beginning of the end” (Chapter 40)

2. 20-30 million zombies (Chapter 43)

3. Hendricks reflects how he survived and not her parents. (Chapter 50)

4. Everyone (Chapter 56)

Short Answer

1. Renard and others with him had to fight underground, in the heat, trapped in tunnels. They were in darkness with limited night-vision goggles. Their gas masks were flawed. They could not use guns because it could blow up the tunnel. (Chapter 44)

2. They spread out and formed a line across the entire country. Then, they walked across the country, fighting zombies as they encountered them. (Chapter 45)

3. Russia is using women to give birth, growing the population to have many citizens to fight in the future. They are also using Maria Zhuganova to spread the word to outside countries. (Chapter 47)

4. Muhammed sees the world uniting over this common goal to survive the zombies. He fears people will forget this unity and return to old ways. (Chapter 52)