54 questions
Each test holds the same questions every time, so you can take them in any order.
The name of this theme is wider than it looks. It is writers and their books, and it is also the story of the English language itself, which is why half of it comes from the history chapter rather than from the chapter on modern society.
Novelists and their books. Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, Robert Louis Stevenson, Thomas Hardy, Arthur Conan Doyle, Evelyn Waugh, Kingsley Amis and Graham Greene, then Ian Fleming, Tolkien, Kipling, Roald Dahl and J K Rowling. A separate question asks which British novelist has won the Nobel Prize in Literature.
Poets and poems. Beowulf, Chaucer, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, the sonnet form, Milton, Robert Burns, Walter Scott, the crowded field of the 1800s, the two soldier poets of the First World War, and Poet's Corner. Dylan Thomas has three questions to himself.
The languages. Celtic in Iron Age Britain, the tribes who came after the Romans left, Norman French at court and Anglo-Saxon in the fields, English winning out by 1400, Caxton and the printing press, Gaelic and Scots, and Welsh and Scottish Gaelic as they are spoken today. The Book of Common Prayer, the King James Bible and the diary of Samuel Pepys sit at the end of that line.
Two shapes cover nearly all of it. Here is a title or a character, who wrote it. Or, which language was spoken by whom and when. A handful want a year instead, such as the year Kipling took the Nobel Prize, and those are the ones to give a second pass.
It is authors, not periods. Almost every trap here is a title attached to the wrong name. Learn the writers in pairs with their two best known books and most of the theme falls into place. Only one question in the whole theme asks you to place a work in a period.
Three poems and three poets. The Daffodils is Wordsworth, The Tyger is Blake, and Anthem for Doomed Youth is Owen. Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon were both soldiers who wrote about the First World War, so a question naming both of them is asking about the war, while a question naming one poem is asking about one man.
Four Nobel names. The handbook gives three British winners of the prize and each did a different job. William Golding was a novelist, Seamus Heaney a poet and Harold Pinter a playwright. Kipling won it separately, and his question asks for the year.
Four languages, not one. Welsh, Scottish Gaelic, Irish Gaelic and Scots are four separate things, and questions ask where each is spoken. Scots is not Scottish Gaelic. Alongside them sits a question on word origins, where some everyday English words came in with the Normans and others were already here in Anglo-Saxon.
One answer the world has moved past. The Welsh Assembly was renamed in 2020. It is the Senedd, or Welsh Parliament, and its members are Members of the Senedd. The question about it asks which languages may be used there, and that answer has not changed, so answer the book and take the new name as background. A Worth knowing note appears beside the answer in practice when a question like this one comes up.
Pick this one if the writers run together in your head, or if the language questions in the history chapter feel like guesswork. It is a good companion to Art, Music, Film and Theatre, which is where Shakespeare's plays are tested. If the history chapter as a whole is the weak spot, the wider track is chapter 3.