History entrance exam, 2016 E.C. (2024)

Capitalism rests on private ownership of the means of production, and the owner puts money into business in order to come out with more money. Profit is the motive that drives the whole system.

Serfdom belongs to feudalism, the order capitalism replaced. Controlled markets describe a command economy, and capitalism does not promise equality of classes.

Textbook: History Grade 12, Unit 1 Development of Capitalism and Nationalism from 1815 to 1914, section 1.1 Development of Capitalism (page 2).

The organisational change at the heart of the Industrial Revolution was the move from the dispersed or putting out system, where merchants handed raw material to families working at home, to the factory, where workers, machines and power were brought together in one building under supervision.

Option B names a technological change rather than an organisational one, and it happened inside the factory. Power also moved from water to coal and steam, not from coal to water as option C claims.

Textbook: History Grade 12, Unit 1, section 1.2 The Industrial Revolution (page 5).

The American Civil War of 1861 to 1865 ended with the defeat of the Confederacy and the abolition of slavery, made law by the Thirteenth Amendment in 1865.

Option A goes much too far. Slavery ended, but racial oppression continued through segregation laws for another century. The southern planter class was ruined by the war, and no United States territory passed to France.

Textbook: History Grade 12, Unit 1, section 1.6 The American Civil War (page 17).

In the Second Balkan War of 1913 Serbia and Greece defeated Bulgaria, and Serbia came out of it much larger. A stronger Serbia alarmed Austria-Hungary, which ruled millions of Slavs of its own, and the hatred between the two states led directly to the crisis of 1914.

Option B belongs to the First Balkan War of 1912 to 1913, which drove the Ottomans out of nearly all their European lands. In the second war the Ottomans actually recovered Edirne.

Textbook: History Grade 12, Unit 1, section 1.7 The Eastern Question (page 20).

Quinine, in use from the early 1850s, gave Europeans reasonable protection against malaria. Before it, malaria killed so many Europeans that they could not survive in the African interior, so this medicine is what made exploration and then occupation possible.

Option C is false. European forces in Africa were usually far smaller than the African armies they fought. Their advantage was the repeating rifle and the machine gun, not numbers.

Textbook: History Grade 11, Unit 6 Africa and the Outside World 1500 to 1880s, section 6.6 European Explorers and Missionaries 1770 to 1870 (page 165).

Indirect rule, the British system linked with Lord Lugard in Nigeria, governed through rulers who were already there. Chiefs and emirs collected taxes and judged cases on behalf of the colonial government, which kept the cost and the number of European officials low.

Option A describes direct rule, where Africans were shut out of administration. Under indirect rule Africans did serve, but always under a British officer, and they were never given citizenship rights.

Textbook: History Grade 10, Unit 2 Africa and the Colonial Experience, section 2.4.3 Indirect Rule (page 35).