World History: From Mesopotamia to Meiji Japan
50 questions · NCERT Class 11 · BPSC prelims pattern
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Click the option you think is right. It locks, turns green if correct or red if not, and the explanation opens underneath. Your score updates in the bar at the top as you go, and Calculate final score at the bottom gives the full breakdown. Choose Not attempted when you would only be guessing.
+1 mark — Correct answer
−1/3 mark — Wrong answer
0 — no penalty — Not attempted, the last option on every question
−1/3 mark — Row left completely blank in the real exam
Questions 9, 27, 32 and 36 carry a note where the key is disputed or a second option is also defensible.
Early Societies6 questions
1. Consider the following statements regarding the art of writing in Mesopotamia:
1. Mesopotamians wrote on clay tablets.
2. Their Akkadian language was replaced by the Sumerian language written in cuneiform.
3. A cuneiform sign stood for a single vowel or consonant, as in English, which made the script easy to read.
Select the true statement.
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Answer: (C) Only 1
Only the first holds. Sumerian was replaced by Akkadian, not the other way round, and a cuneiform sign stood for a syllable rather than a single vowel or consonant, which made the script hard to learn.
2. Consider the following statements regarding Mesopotamian society:
1. The nuclear family was considered ideal.
2. The father was the head of the family.
3. The father’s house, livestock, fields, etc. were inherited by his sons.
Select the true statement.
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Answer: (D) 1, 2 and 3
All three hold: the nuclear family was the norm, the father headed it, and his house, herds and fields passed to his sons.
3. Consider the following statements regarding town planning in Mesopotamia:
1. The town planning system was strong in Mesopotamia.
2. Arrangements were made for drainage like those at Mohenjodaro.
3. Light entered the rooms not through windows but through doorways opening onto the courtyard.
Select the false statement(s).
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Answer: (A) 1 and 2 only
This asks for the false statements, and those are the first two. Ur had narrow, winding streets and no planned layout, and there were no street drains of the kind found at Mohenjodaro; drains ran into the inner courtyards of houses instead. The third statement is true.
4. Arrange the following in chronological order:
1. Evidence of the use of fire in Africa
2. The dog was domesticated in Asia
3. The cave paintings of Bhimbetka
4. Cattle and dogs were domesticated in Africa
Select the correct sequence (here > means “came before”).
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Answer: (B) 1 > 3 > 2 > 4
The key orders them: evidence of fire in Africa first, then the Bhimbetka paintings, then the domestication of the dog in Asia, and last the domestication of cattle and dogs in Africa. Fire use is by far the oldest, reaching back hundreds of thousands of years.
5. Consider the following statements regarding Mesopotamia:
1. Mesopotamian cities were part of the Bronze Age culture.
2. Mesopotamian weapons were made of bronze.
Select the true statement.
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Answer: (C) Both 1 and 2
Both hold. Mesopotamian towns belonged to the Bronze Age, and their tools and weapons were of bronze, made from copper and tin brought in by trade because the region had no metal of its own.
6. Consider the following statements regarding Mesopotamia:
1. They had knowledge of squares, square roots and compound interest in mathematics.
2. From Mesopotamia we got the division of the year into 12 months.
Select the true statement.
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Answer: (C) Both 1 and 2
Both hold. Mesopotamian tablets include tables of squares, square roots and compound interest, and the division of the year into twelve months by the moon’s cycle, of the day into 24 hours and of the hour into 60 minutes all come down from Mesopotamia.
Empires: Rome & the Mongols12 questions
7. Consider the following statements about Roman society:
1. The nuclear family was prevalent.
2. The daughter was a primary heir to her father’s property.
3. Husband and wife were considered two separate financial entities.
Select the true statement.
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Answer: (D) 1, 2 and 3
All three hold. The nuclear family was widespread, a woman remained a primary heir of her father’s property, and husband and wife were treated as two financial entities rather than one.
8. Consider the following statements about the Roman economy:
1. Olive oil was the main export item.
2. The gold and silver mines of Italy were worked with water power.
3. A well-organised commercial and banking system operated at the time.
Select the true statement.
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Answer: (B) 1 and 3 only
The second statement puts the mines in the wrong country. Water-powered hydraulic mining was used in the gold and silver mines of Spain, not Italy. Spanish olive oil was a vast commercial trade, and the empire did run well-organised commercial and banking networks.
9. Select the false statement regarding slavery and the control of workers in the Roman Empire.
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Answer: (C) Not much attention was paid to labour management in the Roman system.
The key picks (C): Roman agricultural writers paid a good deal of attention to managing labour, the opposite of what it claims.
Check this one. (A) is also false by NCERT’s own account: slaves may have done most of the work in Republican Italy, but that was no longer true of the empire as a whole. The key accepts only (C), so mark (C) if this appears as written.
10. Which of the following events did not occur during the first five centuries after Christ?
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Answer: (D) Arrival of Buddhism in Japan
Buddhism reached Japan in the sixth century, outside the window. Constantinople was founded in 330, the empire was divided between East and West in 395, and paper was invented in China early in the second century.
11. Who was the first emperor of Rome?
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Answer: (C) Augustus
Augustus became the first emperor in 27 BCE, ending the Roman Republic.
12. Consider the following statements with reference to the “crisis of the third century” in the Roman Empire:
1. Antioch, the western capital of the Roman Empire, was attacked by the ruler of Iran.
2. The empire was invaded by tribes of Germanic origin.
3. Many emperors ruled the Roman Empire within a very short period.
Select the true statement.
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Answer: (C) 2 and 3 only
Antioch was the empire’s eastern capital, not its western one, which rules out the first statement, though the Iranian ruler Shapur I did claim to have captured it. Germanic tribes invaded, and twenty-five emperors ruled in just forty-seven years.
13. Who introduced the gold coin called the ‘solidus’?
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Answer: (C) Constantine
Constantine introduced the solidus, a coin of 4.5 grams of pure gold that stayed in circulation long after the Western empire fell.
14. With respect to the military structure of the Mongol Empire, what was the distinguishing feature of the armed forces in Mongol and other nomadic societies?
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Answer: (C) All able-bodied adult males of the tribe bore arms and formed the armed forces when needed.
In nomadic societies every able-bodied adult male bore arms and could be mobilised when needed, instead of there being a salaried standing army.
15. What was the ‘yasa’ of the Mongols?
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Answer: (C) A compilation of the traditional practices of the Mongol tribe
The yasa was a compilation of the customary practices of the Mongol tribe, later elaborated into a legal code associated with Genghis Khan.
16. Why did no cities emerge in the region of Mongolia?
1. Agriculture was not adopted by the Mongols.
2. They gave priority to animal husbandry.
Select the true statement.
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Answer: (C) Both 1 and 2
Both hold. The Mongols were pastoralists and hunters rather than farmers, and without an agricultural surplus the region produced no cities.
17. Consider the following statements regarding Genghis Khan:
1. His early name was Temujin.
2. Genghis Khan never crossed the Indus to enter India.
3. Genghis Khan died in 1227.
Select the true statement.
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Answer: (D) 1, 2 and 3
All three hold. Genghis Khan was born Temujin, pursued Jalaluddin to the banks of the Indus in 1221 but turned back without crossing into India, and died in 1227.
18. What was the harkara system?
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Answer: (D) A method of communication
A harkara was a courier or messenger, so the harkara system was communication by relays of runners and riders. The Mongols’ own version, the yam, linked their empire through posts supplied with fresh horses.
Changing Traditions11 questions
19. Who discovered Australia?
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Answer: (A) The Dutch
The first recorded European landing in Australia was by the Dutch navigator Willem Janszoon in 1606. Aboriginal peoples had lived there for tens of thousands of years before any European arrived.
20. Which period of European history is called the Middle Ages?
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Answer: (A) 5th to 15th century
The Middle Ages run from the fall of the Western Roman Empire in the fifth century to the fifteenth century, the age of the Renaissance and the fall of Constantinople.
21. Consider the following statements in the context of feudalism:
1. In economic terms, it was based on the relationship between feudal lords and peasants.
2. Feudalism emerged in a definite form in Europe in the second half of the 10th century.
Select the true statement.
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Answer: (A) Only 1
The first statement captures feudalism’s economic core, the tie between lord and peasant. The key rejects the second statement’s dating: feudal ties had been forming gradually in France from the ninth century, rather than emerging in a definite form in the late tenth.
22. Consider the following statements regarding the clergy:
1. The clergy formed the first order and were under the control of the king.
2. Not everyone could become a priest.
Select the true statement.
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Answer: (B) Only 2
The clergy formed the first order but answered to the Pope, not the king, and the Church had its own laws and lands. Not everyone could become a priest: serfs, the physically disabled and women were barred.
23. What was the ‘taille’?
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Answer: (D) A type of direct tax
The taille was a direct tax that French peasants paid to the king. The clergy and nobility were exempt.
24. Consider the following statements in the context of the “crisis of the fourteenth century”:
1. Environmental crises such as storms, floods and famine intensified in this century.
2. Metal currency became scarce.
3. A large number of people died in an epidemic called the Black Death.
Select the true statement(s).
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Answer: (D) 1, 2 and 3
All three hold. Colder summers, storms and flooding hit harvests; a shortfall in the output of silver mines in Austria and Serbia caused a shortage of metal money; and the Black Death of 1347–50 killed a large share of Europe’s people.
25. Consider the following statements regarding developments in the heliocentric theory after Copernicus:
1. The gap between ‘heaven’ and earth was bridged more than half a century later through the writings of Johannes Kepler and Galileo Galilei.
2. Kepler’s Cosmographical Mystery popularised the sun-centred system by demonstrating that the planets move around the sun in perfect circles.
3. Galileo confirmed the notion of a dynamic world through his work The Motion.
Which of the statements given above are correct?
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Answer: (C) 1 and 3 only
The second statement fails on one word: Kepler showed that the planets move around the sun in ellipses, not perfect circles. The other two are as NCERT puts them.
26. In the early decades of the 15th century, the term ‘humanists’ was used for whom?
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Answer: (B) Teachers
In the early fifteenth century a humanist was a teacher of grammar, rhetoric, poetry, history and moral philosophy.
27. According to the humanists, when did the ‘Dark Ages’ begin?
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Answer: (C) After the fall of the Roman Empire
The humanists held that the Dark Ages began with the collapse of the Roman Empire, and that is the wording the key follows.
Check this one. The empire that fell in the fifth century was the Western half, so (B) says much the same thing more precisely. Answer (C) as the key expects, but be ready for either wording in the exam.
28. Consider the following statements regarding Copernicus:
1. He published the theory of the earth’s mobility in defiance of the prevailing religious belief.
2. According to him, all the planets, including the earth, revolve around the sun.
Select the true statement.
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Answer: (B) Only 2
Copernicus, a devout Christian, feared the clergy’s reaction and held his work back; De revolutionibus was published only as he lay dying in 1543, so the key rejects the picture of him publishing it in defiance. The second statement is his theory.
29. Who wrote ‘The Prince’?
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Answer: (C) Machiavelli
Niccolò Machiavelli wrote The Prince in 1513, a handbook on how rulers win and keep power.
Towards Modernisation21 questions
30. The ‘Trail of Tears’ is related to which of the following events?
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Answer: (C) The forced displacement of Native Americans
The Trail of Tears was the forced removal of the Cherokee and other Native American nations from the south-east to lands west of the Mississippi in the 1830s, on which thousands died.
31. Consider the following statements with reference to 18th-century Europe:
1. The people of Western Europe identified the ‘civilised’ man only on the basis of literacy, organised religion and urbanity.
2. The British philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau considered this standard of civilisation distorted.
Select the true statement.
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Answer: (A) Only 1
Western Europeans did judge civilisation by literacy, organised religion and urban life. But Rousseau was a French-speaking philosopher born in Geneva, not British, which breaks the second statement, even though he did admire the ‘noble savage’.
32. In which year did Britain recognise the United States of America as an independent country?
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Answer: (B) 1781
The key gives 1781.
Check this one. Historically, Britain formally recognised American independence in the Treaty of Paris, signed in September 1783, which is option (C). 1781 is the year of the British surrender at Yorktown. Some textbook timelines give 1781, which is likely where this key comes from, so know both dates.
33. Consider the following statements regarding slavery in the United States of America:
1. The southern states opposed slavery because their economy did not depend on slaves.
2. A civil war broke out between the northern and southern states over the issue of ending slavery.
Select the true statement.
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Answer: (B) Only 2
The first statement is backwards: the southern states defended slavery because their plantation economy depended on it. The Civil War of 1861–65 was fought between states that upheld slavery and those that wanted it abolished.
34. In which country did the rebellion of the Métis take place?
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Answer: (C) Canada
The Métis, of mixed indigenous and European descent, rose against the Canadian government under Louis Riel in 1869–70 and again in 1885.
35. Consider the following statements regarding the provisions made for Native Americans:
1. The Indian Reorganisation Act of 1934 gave natives in reservations the right to buy land and take loans.
2. In 1954, in a ‘Declaration of Indian Rights’ prepared by them, many natives accepted US citizenship on condition that their reservations would not be withdrawn and their traditions would not be interfered with.
Select the true statement.
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Answer: (C) Both 1 and 2
Both hold, and both are close to NCERT’s own wording. The 1934 Act gave reservation communities the right to buy land and raise loans, and the 1954 declaration traded acceptance of US citizenship for guarantees on reservations and traditions.
36. In which year did the Australian settlements get the right to self-governance?
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Answer: (A) 1850
The key gives 1850, the year of the Australian Colonies Government Act, which let the colonies set up their own legislatures and frame their own constitutions.
Check this one. Full responsible self-government followed in the mid-1850s, beginning with New South Wales and Victoria in 1855, and 1855 is also among the options. Answer as the key expects, but know both dates.
37. The British government always called Australia’s land ‘terra nullius’. What does this mean?
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Answer: (A) Land that belongs to no one
Terra nullius means land belonging to no one, the legal fiction by which the British ignored Aboriginal ownership of Australia. Australia’s High Court overturned it in the Mabo case of 1992.
38. Consider the following statements regarding industrialisation in Britain:
1. Only the development of the cotton textile industry formed the first phase of industrialisation.
2. The invention of the railways began the second phase of this process.
Select the true statement.
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Answer: (B) Only 2
The word “only” breaks the first statement: the first phase of industrialisation rested on both cotton and iron. The railways did launch the second phase.
39. In which year was the Balfour Declaration signed?
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Answer: (B) 1917
The Balfour Declaration of November 1917 expressed British support for a “national home for the Jewish people” in Palestine.
40. Consider the following statements regarding the original inhabitants of North America:
1. They came from Africa.
2. They did not develop empires like those of South America.
Select the true statement.
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Answer: (B) Only 2
The first inhabitants of North America came from Asia, across a land bridge over the Bering Strait more than 30,000 years ago, not from Africa. They did not build large empires of the kind that arose further south.
41. Why did people migrate from Europe to America in the 19th century?
1. Conflict between different sects of Christianity
2. The European system of transferring family wealth
3. Land in America was cheaper than in Europe
Select the true statement.
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Answer: (B) Only 2 and 3
The nineteenth-century pull was economic. Land in America was cheap and plentiful, while in much of Europe family land passed to the eldest son, leaving younger sons with none. Religious conflict had driven earlier waves of migration, which is why the key leaves the first statement out.
42. Consider the following statements regarding the Gold Rush in the United States of America:
1. It began in the 19th century.
2. Because of it, a large number of Europeans came to America.
3. It led to the construction of railway lines across the continent.
Select the true statement.
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Answer: (C) 1, 2 and 3
All three hold. Gold was found in California in 1848, drawing migrants from Europe and far beyond, and the rush helped spur the railway that crossed the continent by 1869.
43. In which year did James Cook reach Australia?
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Answer: (C) 1770
Captain James Cook reached the east coast of Australia at Botany Bay in 1770 and claimed it for Britain.
44. In which year did the First Opium War start?
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Answer: (D) 1839
The First Opium War began in 1839, when China tried to stop the British opium trade, and ended in 1842 with the Treaty of Nanjing, which ceded Hong Kong.
45. Consider the following statements regarding the founding of the Communist Party of China:
1. It was founded in 1920, shortly after the Russian Revolution.
2. Mao Zedong took a different path from Russia by basing the revolution on the peasants.
Select the true statement.
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Answer: (B) Only 2
The Chinese Communist Party was founded in 1921, not 1920. Mao Zedong’s departure from the Russian model, building the revolution on the peasantry rather than on urban workers, is accurate.
46. Consider the following statements with reference to people’s communes:
1. They were a collective effort in production to speed up the pace of industrialisation in China.
2. The effort also extended to the agricultural sector.
Select the true statement.
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Answer: (C) Both 1 and 2
Both hold. People’s communes were launched in 1958 during the Great Leap Forward, the drive to industrialise rapidly, and in the countryside they pooled land and labour for collective farming.
47. The ‘April Revolution’ of 1960 was related to which country?
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Answer: (B) South Korea
The April Revolution of 1960 was a student-led uprising in South Korea that forced President Syngman Rhee from power.
48. Consider the following statements with reference to Japan:
1. Japan is made up of only four big islands.
2. There has been a tradition of animal husbandry.
3. Rice is the basic crop and fish the main source of protein.
Select the true statement.
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Answer: (D) Only 3
Japan has four large islands — Honshu, Kyushu, Shikoku and Hokkaido — but many smaller ones too, including the Okinawa chain, so “only four” is wrong. With little pasture land, livestock rearing never became a major tradition; rice is the staple and fish the main protein.
49. In which year did the Meiji Restoration take place?
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Answer: (C) 1868
The Meiji Restoration of 1868 ended the Tokugawa shogunate and restored power to the emperor, launching Japan’s rapid modernisation.
50. When did modern banking institutions begin to be established in Japan?
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Answer: (D) 1872
Modern banks were set up from 1872, when the Meiji government passed a national banking law; the same year, Japan’s first railway opened between Tokyo and Yokohama.
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1 C · 2 D · 3 A · 4 B · 5 C · 6 C · 7 D · 8 B · 9 C · 10 D · 11 C · 12 C · 13 C · 14 C · 15 C · 16 C · 17 D · 18 D · 19 A · 20 A · 21 A · 22 B · 23 D · 24 D · 25 C · 26 B · 27 C · 28 B · 29 C · 30 C · 31 A · 32 B · 33 B · 34 C · 35 C · 36 A · 37 A · 38 B · 39 B · 40 B · 41 B · 42 C · 43 C · 44 D · 45 B · 46 C · 47 B · 48 D · 49 C · 50 D
Scoring: +1 correct, −1/3 wrong, 0 for not attempted, −1/3 for a row left blank.