59 questions
Each test holds the same questions every time, so you can take them in any order.
This theme follows how ordinary life in Britain changed, from serfs working a lord's land to a welfare state and laws against unfair treatment. Its questions are scattered across four chapters of the handbook rather than gathered in one place, which is the reason for practising them together.
The largest block, about a third of the theme, is Britain after 1945. The Beveridge Report and its five Giant Evils, the National Health Service, free secondary schooling, and the social laws of the 1960s.
Next comes the Middle Ages, where the subject is how people lived rather than who ruled. Feudalism, the life of a serf, the Black Death and what it did to wages and to the shape of society afterwards. The Great Plague and the Great Fire of London sit alongside it, and a few questions reach further back still, to the first farmers and to the Bronze and Iron Ages.
The rest is the long argument about work and rights. Farming as the biggest employer before the 18th century, factories with nothing in law to protect the people in them, the first limits on working hours, married women winning the right to keep their own money and property, old age pensions and workplace safety early in the 20th century, equal pay, and the discrimination law and equality bodies of today.
Names, years and numbers, for the most part, and several of them cluster tightly enough to be confused. A smaller group asks what changed as a result of something, which is a different kind of question and usually easier, because the handbook gives one clear consequence. Fewer workers after the Black Death meant surviving labourers could ask for better pay. People leaving the countryside for the towns meant the towns grew richer and a middle class grew with them.
Three men, one decade. William Beveridge wrote the report that set out the plan. Aneurin Bevan, as Minister for Health, set up the National Health Service. Clement Attlee was the Prime Minister who promised the welfare state and delivered it. Beveridge and Bevan are the pair that catch people out, so fix one of them firmly and the other follows.
Four dates in the 1940s. The report was asked for in 1941 and published in 1942. The Education Act, also known as the Butler Act, came in 1944 and ended fees for secondary schooling in England and Wales. The NHS opened in 1948.
The five Giant Evils. Want, Disease, Ignorance, Squalor and Idleness. Learn them as a set, because a question can ask for the whole list or simply for how many there were.
Three disasters, three years. The Black Death reached Britain in 1348 and killed about a third of the people of England, and Scotland and Wales lost roughly the same share. The Great Plague swept London in 1665. The Great Fire destroyed much of London in 1666.
Women's rights arrived in stages. Married women could keep their own money and property under the Acts of 1870 and 1882. The vote came in 1918 for women over 30, and in 1928 on the same terms as men. Equal pay was given by law in the 1960s. Different campaigns, different decades, and questions ask about one stage at a time.
Which body covers where. The Equality and Human Rights Commission is the one for England and Wales. Northern Ireland has its own Equality Commission. Anyone facing discrimination can also go to the Citizens Advice Bureau for advice.
Answers the world has moved past. The handbook's picture of women in the UK is a snapshot from when it was written. It says women make up about half the workforce, that girls leave school with better results than boys, that women outnumber men at university, and that more women hold senior jobs than ever before. The direction of all four is still right and the figures have moved on since. The test marks the handbook's answers correct, so answer the book. When one of these comes up in practice, a Worth knowing note appears beside the answer with the current position, so you learn both.
Pick this one if the welfare state names and dates run together, or if the medieval social history feels thin next to the kings and battles. It is one of the shorter themes. It overlaps with Government, Parliament and Politics, because the campaigns that won the vote are the same campaigns that won other rights, and with Law, Courts and the Police where the law protects people from unfair treatment. If the whole history chapter is the problem rather than social change in particular, the wider track is chapter 3.