HSC History Extension Practice Questions
The 64 practice questions inside the HSC History Extension Mastery Pack, grouped by area of study. Every question comes with a full worked solution.
- Key question: Who are historians?
- Multiple choice × 6
- To what extent × 1
- Assess × 1
- Key question: What are the purposes of history?
- Multiple choice × 4
- Evaluate × 1
- Explain × 1
- Key question: How has history been constructed, recorded and presented over time?
- Multiple choice × 6
- Explain × 1
- Analyse × 1
- Key question: Why have approaches to history changed over time?
- Multiple choice × 3
- To what extent × 1
- Producers of history from ancient times to the present day (examples chosen by this hub to serve the four key questions)
- Multiple choice × 12
- Compare × 1
- Evaluate × 1
- Discuss × 1
- Case studies: Ancient (Cleopatra VII; Athenian Democracy; Rome’s Impact on the Provinces; The Origins of Early Christianity; The Collapse of the Western Roman Empire)
- Multiple choice × 4
- Explain × 1
- Case studies: Medieval and Early Modern (The Crusades; Witch Hunts and Witch Trials; Elizabeth I and the Elizabethan Age; Spain and the Aztec Empire)
- Multiple choice × 3
- Analyse × 1
- Case studies: Modern (Napoleon; Western Imperialism in the 19th Century; A British Prime Minister: Winston Churchill OR Margaret Thatcher; Appeasement; John Fitzgerald Kennedy)
- Multiple choice × 4
- Assess × 1
- Case studies: Asia (Genghis Khan; The Opium Wars; The Partition of India)
- Multiple choice × 2
- Case studies: Australia (The Frontier in Australia; Women Convicts in New South Wales; An Australian Prime Minister: Robert Menzies OR Gough Whitlam; Representations of Anzac)
- Multiple choice × 3
- Evaluate × 1
- HSC exam technique (Section I and Section II) and the History Project
- Multiple choice × 1
- Write × 2
Show the worked answer
Answer: Worked solution
Only to a limited extent. Academic training brings shared standards of evidence, citation and peer review that make claims testable, but the term 'historian' cannot be confined to the academy without excluding most of the people who have constructed the past.
The professional model is recent. It emerged with Ranke's Berlin seminar in the nineteenth century, which trained students in critical analysis of archival documents and spread to universities and journals across Europe and the United States. This gave history a method and an institutional home, and it is why academic history remains the benchmark against which other forms are tested: its footnotes allow readers to check how conclusions were reached.
Yet the producers of history long predate that profession. Herodotus had no training, relied on oral reports and travel, and sometimes recorded stories he doubted, yet his inquiry into the causes of the Greco-Persian Wars defined the genre. Sima Qian combined court records with fieldwork and moral judgement at the Han court. Denying either the title would make 'historian' a synonym for 'modern professional', which tells us more about nineteenth-century institutions than about history-making.
Today, too, non-academic producers shape public understanding more than most monographs. Aboriginal knowledge-holders transmit histories of Country orally across generations; Peter Weir's film Gallipoli helped embed the Anzac legend; museum curators decide how national pasts are displayed. These forms can mislead, but so can academic work, as Butterfield's critique of Whig history showed.
The better distinction, therefore, is not between trained and untrained but between more and less rigorous constructions of the past. Anyone who deliberately constructs and communicates an account of the past for an audience is producing history; the questions are how they use evidence and how open their methods are to scrutiny. Academic training is one strong guarantee of rigour, not the definition of the historian.
20 full-length practice exams with worked solutions, 20 revision notes, 64 practice questions and 200 flashcards.
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