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Class 10 History: Print Culture and the Modern World, 8 practice questions with answers

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Here are 8 practice questions on Chapter 5 of the NCERT Class 10 History textbook, India and the Contemporary World II: Print Culture and the Modern World. Every question has a worked answer and the textbook page behind it. Several turn the chapter's own dates and figures into short sums: how print travelled across East Asia, Gutenberg's Bible, how fast the presses ran and how many books Europe printed. The rest cover folk tales in print, manuscripts in India and the colonial state's control of the press.

These questions are our own, drafted with AI help. Every number was re-computed by a script and every answer was checked against the chapter, but no practising teacher has reviewed them yet. None of them is a textbook exercise or a sample-paper question reworded. If you find a mistake, please tell us.

What the chapter says you need

Facts from the NCERT textbook (India and the Contemporary World II, Reprint 2026-27, Chapter 5, printed pages 105 to 128):

How print began

Question 1. (1 mark) Which of these is among the oldest books in the world that still exist and were printed with movable metal type, before Gutenberg's press? (A) the Diamond Sutra (B) the Jikji of Korea (C) the Tripitaka Koreana (D) Gutenberg's Bible

Answer: (B) the Jikji of Korea. It was printed in the late fourteenth century, and its second volume is kept in the National Library of France (page 108). The Diamond Sutra of AD 868 had woodcut pictures (page 106), the Tripitaka Koreana was carved on about 80,000 woodblocks (page 107), and Gutenberg's press came in the 1430s (page 108).

Question 2. Books in China were printed from inked woodblocks from AD 594. Buddhist missionaries took hand printing to Japan around AD 768-770, and the Diamond Sutra was printed in AD 868. (a) About how many years after the Chinese start did hand printing reach Japan? (b) About how long after that was the Diamond Sutra printed? (c) Why was the traditional Chinese "accordion book" folded and stitched at the side?

Answer: (a) about 175 years; (b) about 100 years; (c) only one side of each sheet could be printed. (a) 768 − 594 = 174 and 770 − 594 = 176, so about 175 years (page 106). (b) 868 − 770 = 98 and 868 − 768 = 100, so about a century (page 106). (c) The paper was thin and porous, so it could not take print on both sides; the sheets were folded and stitched instead (page 106).

Question 3. Gutenberg printed about 180 copies of the Bible, and the work took three years. No more than 50 copies have survived. (a) On average, how many copies were finished each year? (b) At least how many copies have been lost? (c) At most, what share of the copies survives, to the nearest whole per cent? (d) Why is no copy exactly like another?

Answer: (a) 60; (b) 130; (c) about 28%; (d) the decoration and colour were added by hand. (a) 180 ÷ 3 = 60 copies a year (page 109). (b) 180 − 50 = 130 (page 110). (c) 50 ÷ 180 × 100 ≈ 27.8, so about 28% (page 110). (d) The press printed the text in black with metal type, but artists painted and illuminated the borders and filled in the coloured letters later, in the gaps Gutenberg had left, so each page of each copy differs (page 110).

Faster presses, more books

Question 4. By the chapter's figures, Gutenberg's machine turned out 250 one-sided sheets an hour, and Richard M. Hoe's power-driven cylindrical press of the mid-nineteenth century 8,000 sheets an hour. Take the two figures as the textbook gives them. (a) How many times faster was Hoe's press? (b) A print job needs 20,000 sheets (a made-up figure). How many hours would each press take? (c) What was Hoe's press especially useful for? (d) Name one later step in printing technology from the chapter.

Answer: (a) 32 times; (b) 80 hours on Gutenberg's press, 2.5 hours on Hoe's; (c) printing newspapers; (d) any one of the offset press, electric presses, better paper feeding and plates, automatic paper reels or photoelectric colour controls. (a) 8,000 ÷ 250 = 32 (pages 109 and 118). (b) 20,000 ÷ 250 = 80 hours; 20,000 ÷ 8,000 = 2.5 hours. (c) The chapter says it suited newspapers in particular (page 118). (d) The offset press, developed towards 1900, could print as many as six colours at once, and electric presses sped up printing from about 1900, followed by the other improvements listed (page 118).

Question 5. Europe's markets saw 20 million printed copies in the second half of the fifteenth century and about 200 million in the sixteenth century. (a) How many times more copies were printed in the sixteenth century? (b) Work out the average number of copies per year in each period. (c) By how many times did the yearly rate grow? Why is this smaller than your answer to (a)? (d) What happened to printing presses in Europe between 1450 and 1550?

Answer: (a) 10 times; (b) 4 lakh a year, then 20 lakh a year; (c) 5 times, because the sixteenth century is twice as long a period; (d) presses were set up in most countries. (a) 200 ÷ 20 = 10 (page 109). (b) The second half of a century is 50 years: 2,00,00,000 ÷ 50 = 4,00,000. A whole century is 100 years: 20,00,00,000 ÷ 100 = 20,00,000. (c) 20,00,000 ÷ 4,00,000 = 5. The total grew ten times, but it was spread over 100 years instead of 50. (d) Most European countries had presses by 1550, and German printers moved abroad to find work and help start new ones (page 109).

Readers, writers and manuscripts

Question 6. The Grimm Brothers of Germany published a collection of folk tales in 1812. (a) Where did the tales come from? (b) What was cut out before they were printed? (c) Explain the chapter's point that print both kept old tales and changed them. (d) Why did children become an important group of readers in the late nineteenth century?

Answer: (a) The brothers spent years gathering traditional tales from peasants (page 117). (b) Anything thought unsuitable for children, or that the elites would find vulgar, was edited out (page 117). (c) Printing put the tales on paper so they would not be lost, but because of the editing the printed versions were not the stories as villagers told them, so rural tales took a new form (page 117). (d) Primary education was made compulsory from the late nineteenth century, so school textbooks became vital to publishers, and France set up a children's press in 1857 (page 117).

Question 7. (a) On what were manuscripts copied in India before print? (b) Give two reasons why manuscripts were not much used in everyday life. (c) How did many pupils in the village schools of pre-colonial Bengal become literate without ever reading a text? (d) Did manuscripts stop when print arrived?

Answer: (a) On palm leaves or on handmade paper, sometimes with illustrations, and kept between wooden covers or sewn together (page 119). (b) Any two: they were very expensive; they were fragile and had to be handled with care; and they were hard to read because the script was written in many different styles (pages 119-120). (c) The teacher dictated passages from memory and the pupils wrote them down, so they learnt to write without reading books (page 120). (d) No. They went on being made until the late nineteenth century, and fine ones such as the 1824 Diwan of Hafiz were still produced for the rich after the letterpress arrived (page 119).

Print and the colonial state

Question 8. (a) Put these in time order, and say for each whether control of the press grew tighter or looser: the press rules restored by Thomas Macaulay under Governor-General Bentinck; the Vernacular Press Act; the Calcutta Supreme Court's regulations; the demands for a clamp-down after the revolt of 1857. (b) During the First World War, 22 newspapers were made to furnish securities under the Defence of India Rules, and 18 of them closed rather than obey. How many stayed open, and what share closed, to the nearest whole per cent? (c) About how many newspapers were suppressed in August 1942, and under which law were reports on the Quit India movement controlled? (d) Was colonial control of the press a steady, one-way tightening? Use your answer to (a).

Answer: (a) The 1820s regulations of the Calcutta Supreme Court (tighter); Macaulay's new rules of 1835 (looser: they brought back the earlier freedoms); the clamp-down demanded after 1857 (tighter); the Vernacular Press Act of 1878, modelled on the Irish Press Laws (tighter) (page 127). (b) 22 − 18 = 4 stayed open; 18 ÷ 22 × 100 ≈ 81.8, so about 82% closed (page 127). (c) About 90, under the Defence of India Act passed when the Second World War began (page 127). (d) No. Control tightened in the 1820s, eased in 1835 after editors petitioned Bentinck, and tightened sharply after 1857 as vernacular papers grew openly nationalist (page 127).

Map work for this chapter

There is none. In the 2026-27 curriculum the History map items all come from Nationalism in India: the 1920 and 1927 Congress sessions, the three satyagrahas, Jallianwala Bagh and the Dandi March (CBSE Social Science curriculum 2026-27, PDF page 7). Print Culture is still in the board paper's History section (PDF page 9).

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Sources

All opened and read on 3 November 2026. Page numbers are the printed page numbers of the textbook; printed page = PDF page + 102.

The facts and figures are from the textbook pages above. The questions, the made-up figures and the worked answers are our own, and every number was re-computed by script. This guide is general information; follow your teacher and the textbook.

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