GCSE-readyKS3 History: common mistakes
The wrong answers students pick most often in our History questions, and why they are wrong. Read these before a test, then open the lesson for anything that surprises you.
Britain before 1066: a turning point and a local site
- Turning point: the Neolithic Revolution
- Not “Around AD 43”. That is when the Romans invaded.
- Not “Around 1066”. That is the Norman Conquest.
- Not “People moved around more than before”. Hunter-gatherers moved around; farmers settled.
- Local history before 1066: Sutton Hoo and place names
- Not “William the Conqueror”. William died in 1087 and was buried in Normandy.
- Not “-chester”. That shows a Roman fort.
- Not “-ham”. That is Old English (Anglo-Saxon).
Medieval Britain, 1066 to 1509
- 1066: the year of three kings
- Not “14 October 1066”. That was the date of the Battle of Hastings itself.
- How William controlled England
- Not “The fenced yard”. The fenced yard was the bailey.
- Medieval life: farming, wool and towns
- Not “Into one small field per family, fenced off”. Fenced, separate fields came later with enclosure.
- The medieval Church, the Crusades and Thomas Becket
- Not “The Pope lived there”. The Pope lived in Rome.
- Monks, parish churches and medieval culture
- Not “A printed newspaper”. Printing only reached England in 1476.
- Henry VII: making the Tudor crown safe
- Not “Catherine of Aragon”. She married Henry's sons, Arthur then Henry VIII.
- Not “He was executed”. That happened to Perkin Warbeck.
- Not “The Earl of Warwick”. That was Lambert Simnel's claim.
Belief, daily life and London, 1558 to 1666
- Catholics, the Counter-Reformation and the Gunpowder Plot
- Not “Henry VIII's break with Rome”. That was the English Reformation.
- Not “Martin Luther”. Luther was a Protestant reformer.
- Not “John Calvin”. Calvin was a Protestant reformer.
- Work, leisure and the theatre in Shakespeare's England
- Not “Women”. Women only acted on the public stage after the Restoration.
- Not “Shoreditch”. The Theatre was in Shoreditch; its timber went to build the Globe on Bankside.
- Not “The Great Fire of London”. The Great Fire was in 1666.
- Restoration London: the Great Plague and the Great Fire
- Not “About 10 million”. That is far more than London's whole population.
- Not “Samuel Pepys”. Pepys wrote a diary describing the fire.
Ideas, industry and reform, 1745 to 1901
- Life and reform in industrial towns
- Not “Cholera spread through bad air”. That was the old miasma theory that Snow challenged.
Slavery, empire and Ireland
- The British Empire: India and Africa
- Not “All of it”. No empire has ever ruled the whole world.
World history studies
- World history: China's Qing dynasty, 1644 to 1911
- Not “Opium”. Opium was sold INTO China by British traders.
Themes across time: migration and landscape
- Theme: migration to, from and within the British Isles
- Not “55 BC”. Julius Caesar landed in 55 BC but did not stay; the conquest began in AD 43.
- Not “Invited more to come”. The opposite: they were forced out.
- Theme: Britain's changing landscape
- Not “AD 43”. That is when the Roman invasion began.
Votes, war and dictators, 1901 to 1945
- Votes for women
- Not “By smashing windows”. That was a suffragette tactic.
- Not “By going on hunger strike”. That was a suffragette tactic.
- Not “By setting fire to buildings”. That was a suffragette tactic.
- Why did the First World War begin?
- Not “Germany, Austria-Hungary and Italy”. That was the Triple Alliance.
- The First World War: the Western Front and the peace
- Not “28 June 1919”. That was when the Treaty of Versailles was signed.
- Not “The United Nations”. The UN was founded in 1945, after the Second World War.
- The Second World War and Churchill's leadership
- Not “The Allies landed in Normandy”. That was D-Day in 1944.
The Holocaust
- The Holocaust: ghettos, killing and remembrance
- Not “Auschwitz-Birkenau”. Auschwitz was liberated by Soviet troops on 27 January 1945.
Britain since 1945
- Creating the welfare state
- Not “William Beveridge”. Beveridge wrote the report but did not create the NHS.
World history: Russia and the USA
- World history: Russia from tsars to revolution
- Not “Kaiser”. Kaiser was the German emperor's title.
- Not “Stalin”. Stalin became leader after Lenin died in 1924.
- World history: Stalin, the Cold War and the fall of the USSR
- Not “Gave each peasant their own land”. That was the Bolshevik promise; Stalin did the opposite.
- Not “Neil Armstrong”. Armstrong was the first person on the Moon, in 1969.
- Not “Restructuring”. Restructuring was perestroika.
- World history: the USA from boom to superpower, 1900 to 1945
- Not “Germany's invasion of Poland”. That started the war in Europe in 1939, but the USA stayed out.
- World history: the civil rights movement in the USA
- Not “Laws that abolished slavery”. Slavery was abolished by the 13th Amendment in 1865.
- Not “Segregation was 'separate but equal'”. That was the 1896 decision that Brown overturned.