The Three Orders — History STD 11 Humanities — Question

Who was Pizarro? Discuss his achievements in the Inca region.

Discuss the extent to which (a) hunting and (b) constructing shelters would have been facilitated by the use of language. What other modes of communication could have been used for these activities?

The Examination System
Entry to the elite ruling class (about 1.1 million till 1850) had been largely through an examination. This required writing an eight-legged essay (pa-ku wen) in classical Chinese in a prescribed form. The examination was held twice every three years, at different levels and of those allowed to sit only 1-2 per cent passed the first level, usually by the age of 24, to become what was called 'beautiful talent'. At any given time before 1850 there were about 526,869 civil and 212,330 military provincial (sheng-yuan) degree holders in the whole country. Since there were only 27,000 official positions, many lower-level degree holders did not have jobs. The examination acted as a barrier to the development of science and technology as it demanded only literary skills. In 1905, it was abolished as it was based on skills in classical Chinese learning that had, it was felt, no relevance for the modern world.
Questions:

1. Write any two key features of Chinese examination system.
2. Why was this examination system abolished? Give two reasons.
3. How many civil and military provincial degree holders were in the whole country before 1850?

Why were mobile animal herders not necessarily a threat to town life?

Discuss the methods of the warfare of Mongol army.

In his novel Hard Times, Charles Dickens (1812-70), perhaps the most severe contemporary critic of the horrors of industrialisation for the poor, wrote a fictional account of an industrial town he aptly called Coketown. 'It was a town of red brick, or of brick that would have been red if the smoke and ashes had allowed it; but as matters stood it was a town of unnatural red and black like the painted face of a savage. It was a town of machinery and tall chimneys, out of which interminable serpents of smoke trailed themselves forever and ever, and never got uncoiled. It had a black canal in it, and a river that ran purple with ill-smelling dye, and vast piles of building full of windows where there was a rattling and a trembling all day long, and where the piston of the steam-engine worked monotonously up and down, like the head of an elephant in a stare of melancholy madness.'
Questions:

1. Who was Charles Dickens?
2. About which period and the country he is talking about in this passage?
3. Highlight any four social problems mentioned here.

D.H.Lawrence (1885-1930), British essayist and novelist, writing seventy years after Dickens, described the change in a village in the coal-belt, change which he had not experienced, but about which he had heard from older people.
'Eastwood must have been a tiny village at the beginning of the nineteenth century, a small place of cottages and fragmentary rows of little four-roomed miners' dwellings, the homes of the old colliers. But somewhere about 1820 the company must have sunk the first big shaft and installed the first machinery of the real industrial colliery. Most of the little rows of dwellings were pulled down, and dull little shops began to rise along the Nottingham Road, while on the down-slope the company erected what is still known as the New Buildings little four-room houses looking outward into the grim, blank street, and the back looking into the desert of the square, shut in like a barracks enclosure, very strange.
Questions:

1. What do you know about D.H. Lawrence? What did he describe?
2. Which particular class is he referring to?
3. Write a few effects of early industrialisation on villages and towns.

How do later Mongol reflections on the yasa bring out the uneasy relationship they had with the memory of Genghis Khan?

How did long term changes in population levels affect economy and society in Europe?

What do you know about the Arawakian Lucayos? Discuss the way of life the Arawakian Lucayos led.