Subject

History

The human story, from the Stone Age to the modern world - one tiny step at a time.

History here is arranged as a single chronological path, from prehistory and the first civilisations through Greece, Rome, the medieval world, the Islamic golden age and the Renaissance, into revolutions, industry, two world wars and the modern era.

The final unit is different: instead of a period, it covers the skills historians use. Sources, bias, evidence and how we know what we claim to know. That unit is worth doing early as well as last, because it changes how you read all the others.

Every argument about the present borrows from history, usually badly. Knowing what actually happened is useful mainly as a defence against confident people telling you what it proves.

Units: 18
Steps: 361
Questions: 2,115

Who this track is for

Accessible from primary level, with the later units on historiography and the twentieth century reaching secondary and early undergraduate depth.

How to approach it

Dates matter less than sequence, so focus on what came before what
Try the history skills unit early to get more out of everything else
Connect periods across regions rather than treating each as isolated

Study guide · 9 min readHow to Learn HistoryDates are the least important thing in history and the most heavily revised. A guide to why causation beats chronology, why the skills unit belongs first rather than last, and how to read a source without taking it on trust.

What you will be able to do

Place the major periods and civilisations in order without looking them up
Explain why the First World War started without reducing it to one assassination
Judge a source by who wrote it, when, and for whom
Recognise when a historical comparison is doing real work and when it is decoration

The thing people get wrong

That history is a fixed list of events. What happened is often settled; what it meant and why it happened is argued about continuously, and the arguments are the discipline rather than a failure of it.

If you only do 3 units

Do the skills unit first - it changes how you read everything else. Rome is the reference point half of European history keeps returning to, and the Second World War is the period most often invoked in modern argument.

What the questions look like

8 real questions from across the History track, easiest first, each with the answer and the reason behind it. Every unit page below has thirty more.

Picture questionLevel 1
1. 🐂 Prehistoric people covered cave walls with pictures like this. What did they paint most often?
- Wild animalscorrect
- Cars and roads
- Tall castles
- Written words
Most cave paintings show wild animals such as horses, bison, deer and mammoths, which mattered to hunters.
Multiple choiceLevel 1
2. Hammurabi is famous for creating one of the first written...?
- Sets of lawscorrect
- Maps of the world
- Musical songs
- Alphabets
Hammurabi's code was one of the earliest written sets of laws in history.
Multiple choiceLevel 1
3. What did the ancient Egyptians believe in?
- Many different godscorrect
- Only robots
- No gods at all
- Just one tiny god
The Egyptians worshipped many gods who they believed ruled the world.
Multiple choiceLevel 1
4. Alexander the Great came to power as king of which kingdom in northern Greece?
- Macedoncorrect
- Sparta
- Egypt
- Persia
Alexander the Great became king of Macedon, a kingdom in the north of ancient Greece.
Fill the blankLevel 1
5. The peoples of the ancient Americas were skilled at working ____ into fine jewellery and masks.
- goldcorrect
- plastic
- steel
- glass
Aztec and Inca craftworkers were famous for shaping gold into beautiful jewellery and objects.
Fill the blankLevel 1
6. In the feudal system, a lord gave ____ to his knights in return for their loyalty and military service.
- landcorrect
- gold coins
- ships
- books
Lords rewarded knights with grants of land, and in return the knights promised loyalty and fought for their lord.
Fact or fibLevel 2
7. Emperor Nero was ruling Rome when a great fire spread through much of the city in 64 AD.
Answer: True
A great fire swept through Rome in 64 AD during the reign of the emperor Nero.
Choose all that applyLevel 2
8. The Gupta period is remembered for advances in which areas?
- Mathematics and the idea of zerocorrect
- Astronomycorrect
- Art and literaturecorrect
- Building the Great Wall of China
Gupta scholars made important progress in mathematics, including ideas about zero, as well as in astronomy and the arts.

Units in History

Listed in the order they are meant to be worked through.

Practise History

2,115 questions, in tiny sessions you can finish in a few minutes.

Start playing

Where these questions come from. Each unit starts as a plan of the concepts it should cover and the difficulty it should span. Questions are written against that plan with AI assistance, then checked by a validator that rejects anything without a single defensible answer, an explanation, or plausible wrong options. How we write questions sets out the whole process, and corrections are fixed in the bank and reach the site and the app the same day.