Qormaata galuumsa Seenaa, bara 2012 A.L.I (2020)

The textbook lists the marks of the Dark Age, about 500 to 1000 AD, as follows: Greco-Roman civilisation declined, the societies became rural and the cities declined, and feudalism became the social, economic and political order.

Option B says the opposite of that. Towns lost people and wealth in this period, so society was rural, not urban centred.

The tempting wrong pick is D, but the decline of Greco-Roman civilisation is one of the listed features, so it cannot be the exception.

Textbook: History Grade 9, Unit 4 The Middle Ages and Early Modern World, section 4.1.1 Dark Age (page 66).

Early capitalism means putting money, that is capital, into trade, mining and manufacturing in order to earn profit. So investment is the activity that defines it.

Serfdom, vassalage and manorialism (printed here as memorialism) all belong to feudalism, the system early capitalism grew out of and slowly replaced.

Textbook: History Grade 11, Unit 4 The Middle Ages, section 4.4 Development of Early Capitalism 1500 to 1789 (page 100).

Between about 500 and 1500 the order in Europe was feudalism: land was held in exchange for service, lords and the Church controlled the land, and peasants worked it.

The factory system came with the Industrial Revolution after 1750, and capitalism was consolidated even later. The split in the Church is a single event of 1054 and later of the Reformation, not a description of the whole political, economic and cultural order.

Textbook: History Grade 9, Unit 4, section 4.1.2 Feudal Society (page 66).

The Renaissance, meaning rebirth, was the cultural movement of the 14th to 16th centuries that rediscovered Greek and Roman learning. Its central habit of mind was reason, free inquiry and a questioning attitude.

Option A is the reverse of what happened, because Renaissance Italy grew rich on town trade. Full freedom of religion is much later, and feudal society had been born centuries before.

Textbook: History Grade 11, Unit 4, section 4.6 The Renaissance (page 106).

Calligraphy, the art of beautiful writing, is one of the best known achievements of Muslim Arab civilisation, alongside algebra, medicine and astronomy.

Gothic painting belongs to Western Europe, Latin grammar to Rome, and democracy to ancient Greece.

Textbook: History Grade 9, Unit 4, section 4.2.1 The Rise and Expansion of Islam (page 69).

History is the study and interpretation of what people did in the past, based on evidence. Interpretation is the key word: the historian does not only collect facts, he explains them.

Options A and D describe prehistory, the time before writing. Option C is too narrow, because history is not limited to societies that wrote.

Textbook: History Grade 9, Unit 1, sections 1.1 and 1.2 The Discipline of History (pages 2 to 4).