94 questions
Each test holds the same questions every time, so you can take them in any order.
This theme is the fighting itself, from the first Roman landing to Afghanistan. Almost all of it sits in the history chapter, so the questions fall into a rough order and revising them in that order works. The twentieth century takes up more of it than any other period, by some distance.
The earliest questions are about invasions. Julius Caesar came in 55 BC and failed, the Romans succeeded in AD 43, the Jutes, Angles and Saxons came once they left, the Vikings arrived from Denmark and Norway in AD 789, and in 1066 William, Duke of Normandy beat the Saxon king Harold at Hastings. The handbook makes a point of the fact that nothing invading from abroad has beaten England since. The Middle Ages then bring Bannockburn in 1314, where Robert the Bruce beat the English, the Crusades, the Hundred Years War and Henry V at Agincourt in 1415, and the Wars of the Roses from 1455 to Bosworth Field in 1485, where Richard III was killed.
Next the Spanish Armada of 1588, which Spain sent in order to seize England and restore the Catholic faith there, and the civil war that broke out in 1642. Here the questions are about where that war was fought rather than why, so Marston Moor and Naseby are the names to hold, along with Cromwell's campaign in Ireland, the Battle of the Boyne in 1690 and Glencoe. The reasons the war happened and the way it ended are on the Kings, Queens and the Monarchy page, so the two sets of notes do not repeat each other.
After that come Culloden in 1746, then the wars against Napoleon, and then the two Victorian wars fought a long way from home, the Crimean against Russia and the Boer in South Africa.
The largest block by far is the twentieth century. The First World War from 1914 to 1918, set off by the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria, with Britain on the Allied side against the Central Powers, and the Easter Rising in Dublin in 1916. Then Hitler taking power in 1933, the invasion of Poland in 1939, Dunkirk, the Battle of Britain, the Blitz, Pearl Harbour, D-Day on 6 June 1944, the defeat of Germany in May 1945 and the two American atom bombs that ended the war with Japan that August, at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Winston Churchill runs through all of it and has more questions to himself than any other person in the theme.
The theme closes with Britain after 1945. Its own atomic bomb, the Falkland Islands, Kuwait, the former Republic of Yugoslavia, Iraq and Afghanistan.
Most are plain recall. A year, a battle, a commander, or which side a country was on. More of them turn on a year than on anything else, so if dates are where your practice score drops, this is the theme that will show it.
What makes this one different is how many questions want an exact figure. Indian soldiers who served in the First World War and how many of them were killed, British casualties overall and on the first day of the Somme, how many troops got away from the beaches at Dunkirk, how many nations joined the Afghanistan coalition. A rough sense of the number is not enough to pick between four options, so those are the ones to go back over.
Two questions give you a line Churchill said and ask what he was talking about, so learn the occasion along with the words. One question is put the other way round, naming three wartime allies and one country that was on the other side, so read the whole question before you look at the options.
Trafalgar and Waterloo. Both are Napoleon and the years look alike. Trafalgar was at sea in 1805 under Admiral Nelson, whose ship HMS Victory you can visit in Portsmouth. Waterloo was on land in 1815 under the Duke of Wellington, who was known as the Iron Duke.
The Battle of Britain and the Blitz. The Battle of Britain was fought in the air in the summer of 1940 and Britain won it, with the Spitfire and the Hurricane doing the work. The Blitz was the German night bombing of cities that followed, and Coventry was the city almost completely destroyed.
Two spirits. The Dunkirk spirit is the phrase that came out of the evacuation from France in 1940. The Blitz spirit is the one people reach for today when they mean the British standing by each other through a hard time.
Which rose was which. Lancaster had the red one. York had the white one.
Two Victorian wars, each asked by its years. The Crimean ran from 1853 to 1856, against Russia, with Britain, Turkey and France on one side, and it is the one the Victoria Cross was created for. The Boer ran from 1899 to 1902, in South Africa, against settlers who had come from the Netherlands.
The Hundred Years War did not last a hundred years. It lasted 116, and there is a question that asks exactly that.
Two Roman dates nearly a century apart. 55 BC is the attempt that failed, AD 43 the invasion that worked. Tie each to its outcome rather than learning the numbers on their own.
Three questions here are about the International Security Assistance Force in Afghanistan, and the handbook writes about it as something still going on. It is not. The force ended in December 2014, having handed security across the country to the Afghan forces it had been building up. A smaller training mission followed and ended in 2021, when NATO and the United States withdrew and the Taliban took control again. The test still marks the handbook's answer correct, so answer the book. When one of these comes up in practice, a Worth knowing note appears beside the answer with what happened afterwards, so you learn both.
Pick this one if years and figures are what your practice score keeps turning on. It is also a good one to take straight after Kings, Queens and the Monarchy, because the two run along the same timeline from different sides and almost no question belongs to both, so the ground is new rather than repeated. If the whole history chapter is the problem rather than the fighting, the wider track is chapter 3.