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Class 10 History: The Rise of Nationalism in Europe, 8 practice questions with answers

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These are 8 practice questions on Chapter 1, The Rise of Nationalism in Europe, of the NCERT Class 10 History textbook, India and the Contemporary World II. Each has a worked answer and the textbook page it comes from. They ask you to put the chapter's events in order, work out what the German customs barriers cost a trader, sort liberal ideas from conservative ones, decide who could vote under each French regime, read the Vienna settlement as a plan, correct false statements about Italy, compare Germany's two attempts at unity, and use the chapter's key words in new situations. Try each one on paper before you open the answer.

These questions are our own, drafted with AI help. Every fact was checked against the textbook page it cites, but no practising teacher has reviewed them yet. If you find a mistake, please tell us.

How this chapter is examined

In CBSE's Social Science paper for 2026-27, History carries 20 of the 80 marks: 18 for the questions and 2 for map work (curriculum, course structure, page 1). The 20 marks are shared by this chapter and the other History chapters CBSE lists, and CBSE does not give this chapter a separate figure. The History map work comes from Nationalism in India, not from this chapter (map work list, page 7).

The paper has 1-mark multiple-choice questions (including assertion and reason), 2, 3 and 5-mark answers, and 4-mark case studies (page 10). The questions below mix short recall with the longer "explain" and "compare" answers that 3 and 5-mark questions need.

What the chapter says you need

Facts from the NCERT textbook (India and the Contemporary World II, Class X, Chapter 1, printed pages 3 to 28):

Putting events in order

Question 1. (a) Put these eight events in the order in which they happened, with the year of each: the zollverein is formed; the Act of Union joins England and Scotland; William I is proclaimed German Emperor; the July Revolution breaks out in France; the Civil Code is issued under Napoleon; the Treaty of Vienna is drawn up; the Frankfurt parliament meets; the Treaty of Constantinople recognises Greece as independent. (b) Three of the eight events took place in France. Which three?

Answer: (a) 1707 Act of Union; 1804 Civil Code; 1815 Treaty of Vienna; 1830 July Revolution; 1832 Treaty of Constantinople; 1834 zollverein; 1848 Frankfurt parliament; 1871 German Emperor. (b) The Civil Code, the July Revolution and the proclamation of William I. The Civil Code was issued in France before it was exported (page 6); the July Revolution was a French upheaval (page 13); and William I was made Emperor at Versailles, in the palace's Hall of Mirrors, which is in France (page 19). The other dates: Act of Union, page 22; Treaty of Vienna, pages 10 to 11; Treaty of Constantinople, page 13; zollverein, page 10; Frankfurt parliament, 18 May 1848, page 17. (Part (b) is our own twist: the German Empire was proclaimed on French soil.)

The cost of a divided market

Question 2. Use the chapter's account of the German lands around 1833.

(a) A merchant takes goods worth 1,000 units of money from Hamburg to Nuremberg. Suppose, to keep the sum simple, that each customs barrier charges 5 per cent of the goods' starting value. How much does he pay in duty on the whole journey, and what share of the goods' value is that?

(b) A tailor needs 20 elles of cloth. How many centimetres more cloth does she get if she buys it in Nuremberg instead of Freiburg?

(c) Name the two changes the zollverein of 1834 made that removed these problems, and say why the commercial classes connected a single market with a single nation.

Answer: (a) 550 units, more than half (55 per cent) of the value; (b) 242 cm more; (c) it abolished tariff barriers and cut over thirty currencies to two, and traders saw a unified economic territory as the way goods, people and capital could move freely. (a) There were 11 barriers at about 5 per cent each (page 10): 11 × 5 per cent = 55 per cent, and 55 per cent of 1,000 = 550. (Real duties were often charged by weight or measure, so this is a simplified sum of our own.) (b) An elle was 65.6 cm in Nuremberg and 53.5 cm in Freiburg (page 10): 20 × 65.6 = 1,312 cm and 20 × 53.5 = 1,070 cm, a difference of 242 cm, or 2.42 m. (c) The zollverein, started by Prussia and joined by most German states, abolished tariff barriers and reduced the currencies from over thirty to two; railways then added to mobility. The new commercial classes saw the barriers as obstacles to trade and growth and wanted one economic territory, so economic interests were harnessed to national unification (page 10).

Liberals and conservatives

Question 3. Say whether each statement below is closer to the liberals of the early nineteenth century, to the conservatives after 1815, or to both. Give the reason from the chapter.

  1. The monarchy and the Church should be kept as they are.
  2. A government should rule by the consent of the governed, through an elected parliament.
  3. A modern army, an efficient bureaucracy and an end to serfdom can make a king stronger.
  4. Goods and money should move between regions without restrictions imposed by the state.
  5. Newspapers, plays and songs that spread ideas of liberty should be censored.
  6. Private property must be protected.

Answer: 1 conservative; 2 liberal; 3 conservative; 4 liberal; 5 conservative; 6 both. (1) Conservatives wanted to preserve traditional institutions such as the monarchy and the Church (page 10). (2) Liberalism stressed government by consent, a constitution and representative government through parliament (page 9). (3) This is the conservatives' lesson from Napoleon: modernisation could strengthen autocratic monarchies (page 10). (4) Economic liberalism meant free markets and the end of state restrictions on goods and capital (page 9). (5) The conservative regimes set up in 1815 used censorship laws against ideas linked to the French Revolution (pages 11 to 12). (6) Liberals stressed that private property could not be violated (page 9), and conservatives counted property among the institutions to preserve (page 10). (Sorting the statements, and spotting the one both sides share, is our own task.)

Who could vote?

Question 4. Four people live in France: P, a 40-year-old man who owns land; Q, a 30-year-old man who owns no property; R, a 35-year-old woman who owns a shop; and S, a 22-year-old man who works for wages and owns nothing. (a) Which of them could vote in revolutionary France's first experiment in liberal democracy, outside the short period of Jacobin rule? (b) Which of them could vote in the republic proclaimed in 1848? (c) The chapter names two groups that kept organising for equal political rights through the nineteenth century. Which of the four people belong to those groups?

Answer: (a) only P; (b) P, Q and S; (c) Q, R and S. (a) In revolutionary France only men who owned property could vote or stand for election; women, and men who owned nothing, could not (page 9). So only P qualifies. (b) In 1848 the National Assembly proclaimed a Republic and gave the vote to all adult males above 21 (page 16; page 17 calls it a republic based on universal male suffrage). P, Q and S are men over 21; R is a woman and still cannot vote. (c) Women and men without property organised opposition movements demanding equal political rights through the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (page 9). R is a woman, and Q and S are men without property. R is the only one left out under every regime here; even in 1848, at the Frankfurt parliament, women could only watch from the visitors' gallery (page 18).

Reading the Vienna settlement as a plan

Question 5. The Treaty of Vienna (1815) made these changes, among others: the Bourbon dynasty was restored in France; a kingdom of the Netherlands that included Belgium was set up; Genoa was added to Piedmont; Austria got control of northern Italy; Russia got part of Poland; and the German confederation of 39 states was left as it was. (a) Which two changes were meant to block France from expanding again? (b) Which change most directly shows the aim of restoring monarchies that Napoleon had overthrown? (c) Which item kept something Napoleon himself had created? (d) Which of these arrangements broke apart within 15 years, and what set it off?

Answer: (a) the kingdom of the Netherlands with Belgium, and Genoa added to Piedmont; (b) the return of the Bourbons; (c) the German confederation of 39 states; (d) the Netherlands with Belgium, after the July Revolution of 1830 in France sparked an uprising in Brussels. (a) States were set up on France's borders to stop French expansion: the Netherlands in the north and Genoa added to Piedmont in the south (page 11). (b) The Bourbons, deposed during the Revolution, were put back on the throne; the main intention of the treaty was to restore the overthrown monarchies (page 11). (c) The confederation of 39 states had been set up by Napoleon and was left untouched (pages 9 to 11). (d) The July Revolution in France sparked an uprising in Brussels, and Belgium split off from the Netherlands (page 13), 15 years after 1815. (Linking the 1815 plan to its failure in 1830 is our own question.)

True or false: Italy

Question 6. Say whether each statement is true or false. Correct the false ones.

  1. Around 1850 Italy was divided among seven states, and Sardinia-Piedmont was the only one with an Italian royal family at its head.
  2. Cavour wanted Italy to become a democratic republic.
  3. Sardinia-Piedmont defeated the Austrian forces in 1859 without any outside help.
  4. Italy's unification was finished in 1861, the year Victor Emmanuel II became king of a united Italy.
  5. Garibaldi's Red Shirts captured Rome in 1867.
  6. Many of the peasants who supported Garibaldi in the south did not know what "Italia" meant.

Answer: 1 true; 2 false; 3 false; 4 false; 5 false; 6 true. (1) True (page 20). (2) False: Cavour was neither a revolutionary nor a democrat; the plan for a unitary Italian republic was Mazzini's (pages 12, 20 and 21). (3) False: Cavour arranged an alliance with France, and Garibaldi's armed volunteers joined the fight (page 21). (4) False: Rome and the Papal States, where a French garrison stood, joined only in 1870 (page 22). (5) False: in 1867 the Red Shirts were no match for the French and Papal troops; Rome joined Italy in 1870, when France withdrew its troops during its war with Prussia (page 22). (6) True: the peasants had never heard of Italia and believed "La Talia" was Victor Emmanuel's wife (page 21).

Germany: two attempts at a nation

Question 7. (a) Each statement below fits either the 1848 attempt to unite Germany or the 1866-71 one. Sort them.

  1. People chosen by voters met in a church and drafted a constitution.
  2. A king refused a crown because it came from elected deputies on their terms.
  3. A chief minister got his way through an army and a body of state officials.
  4. Three neighbouring states were beaten in war within seven years.
  5. Workers and artisans stopped backing the people who led the attempt.
  6. An emperor was declared in a palace belonging to the country that had just been defeated.

(b) Using your sort, explain why the second attempt succeeded where the first failed. (c) What does the place and the gathering chosen for statement 6 tell you about the kind of state the new Germany was?

Answer: (a) 1848: statements 1, 2 and 5; 1866-71: statements 3, 4 and 6. (b) The first attempt had no force behind it and lost its own supporters, while the second had the Prussian king, army and officials behind it. (c) The new state was made from above, by Prussian power and victory in war.

The chapter's key words in new situations

Question 8. Which word from the chapter fits each description? Choose from: absolutist, allegory, ethnic, Junkers, plebiscite, suffrage.

  1. Every voter in a region is asked to say yes or no to one proposal, such as joining another state.
  2. A government whose power has no limits, run from the centre, built on the army and quick to punish.
  3. A painter shows the idea of peace as a woman holding a dove.
  4. An identity based on a shared cultural or tribal background, such as being Welsh or Scottish before there was a British nation.
  5. The right that women and men without property kept demanding in the nineteenth century.
  6. The large landowners of Prussia who backed the monarchy and the army against the liberals of 1848.

Answer: 1 plebiscite; 2 absolutist; 3 allegory; 4 ethnic; 5 suffrage; 6 Junkers. Plebiscite (page 4), absolutist (page 3), allegory (page 23), ethnic (page 22; the English, Welsh, Scots and Irish had ethnic identities before a British nation existed), suffrage (pages 9 and 17) and Junkers (page 19) are all defined or used in the chapter. The dove example and the other situations are our own.

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Sources

All opened and read on 3 November 2026. Page numbers are the printed page numbers of the textbook.

The facts, dates and definitions are from the textbook pages above. The questions, worked answers and the sums in Question 2 are our own. This guide is general information; follow your teacher and the official CBSE notices.

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