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Class 10 History: The Making of a Global World, 8 practice questions with answers

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These are 8 practice questions on Chapter III, The Making of a Global World, 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. The first five stay inside the part of the chapter that the 2026-27 board paper examines: the pre-modern world, from the silk routes and the travels of food to conquest, disease and trade. They ask you to put events in order, sort what moved between continents and which way, count the American foods on a lunch menu, explain how the centre of world trade moved, and judge three assertion-and-reason pairs. The last three cover the rest of the chapter, which CBSE assesses through a school project: the three flows of the nineteenth century, India's exports under colonial rule, and the numbers of the inter-war years. 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, including 2 marks of map work (curriculum, page 1). For this chapter the board examination covers only subtopics 1 to 1.3: the pre-modern world, the silk routes, the travels of food, and conquest, disease and trade. Subtopics 2 to 4.4, from the nineteenth century to the end of Bretton Woods and the start of 'globalisation', are an interdisciplinary project that the school assesses for 5 marks (page 1). The learning outcomes ask you to show how the world has been interconnected from pre-modern times to today, and to describe the harm colonialism did to the livelihoods of colonised people (page 3). 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).

What the chapter says you need

Facts from the NCERT textbook (India and the Contemporary World II, Class X, Chapter III, printed pages 53 to 78):

Seven events in order

Question 1. Put these events in order, earliest first: (P) an active coastal trade links the Indus valley with West Asia; (Q) Arab traders may have taken pasta to Sicily; (R) the spread of disease germs over long distances has become an unmistakable link; (S) images of ships begin to appear regularly on memorial stones on India's western coast; (T) the Portuguese and Spanish conquest of America is decisively under way; (U) legends of El Dorado send expeditions off from Europe; (V) disease destroys Ireland's potato crop. (a) Give the order. (b) Put the century, or the date, the chapter gives against each one. (c) How many of the seven came before the sixteenth century, when the chapter says the world 'shrank'? (d) The governor whose words appear in Box 1 wrote in 1634. How many years separate that from the start of the Irish famine in 1845?

Answer: (a) P, Q, S, R, T, U, V; (b) P 3000 BCE, Q the fifth century, S from the ninth century, R by the thirteenth century, T by the mid-sixteenth century, U the seventeenth century, V the mid-1840s (1845 to 1849); (c) four: P, Q, S and R; (d) 211 years. (a) and (b) P, page 53; Q, page 54; S, the caption of Fig. 1, a tenth-century memorial stone in the Goa Museum, which says the ship images show how much oceanic trade mattered (page 53); R, page 53; T, page 55; U, page 55; V, page 55 and the Fig. 4 caption. (d) 1845 − 1634 = 211 (Box 1, page 55). (The choice of seven events is our own.)

What moved, and which way

Question 2. For each flow, say what moved (goods, precious metals, ideas, people, germs or food crops) and from where to where, as the chapter describes it: (i) cowries; (ii) Chinese silk on the silk routes; (iii) gold and silver in the silk-route trade; (iv) Buddhism; (v) cotton and sugar in the eighteenth century; (vi) smallpox; (vii) the potato; (viii) slaves; (ix) religious dissenters. (b) Which two flows in the list are of people, and what drove each? (c) Which three flows in the list started in Europe, which two started in America, and which one started in Africa?

Answer: (a) (i) goods used as currency, from the Maldives to China and East Africa; (ii) goods, from China westwards; (iii) precious metals, from Europe to Asia; (iv) ideas, from eastern India in several directions; (v) goods, grown on plantations in America for European markets; (vi) germs, from Europe to America; (vii) a food crop, from America to Europe; (viii) people, from Africa to plantations in America; (ix) people, from Europe to America; (b) (viii) slaves were captured in Africa and forced to work; (ix) dissenters fled persecution at home; (c) from Europe: (iii), (vi) and (ix); from America: (v) and (vii); from Africa: (viii). (i) Page 53. (ii) to (iv) Page 54. (v) Page 56. (vi) Page 55. (vii) Pages 54 to 55. (viii) and (ix) Page 56; the chapter adds that poverty, hunger, crowded cities and disease also pushed thousands of Europeans to leave. (The sorting is our own.)

American foods on an Indian plate

Question 3. A made-up school lunch has ten dishes, each named here by its main ingredient: rice, lentils, potatoes, tomatoes, groundnuts, maize, chillies, curd, wheat and sweet potatoes. (a) By the chapter's list, how many of the ten main ingredients came from America, and what percentage is that? (b) The caption of Fig. 4 says that during the Great Irish Potato Famine about 1,000,000 people starved to death and double that number emigrated. How many people did Ireland lose in all, to death and emigration? (c) The famine ran from 1845 to 1849. Counting both years, what is the average number of deaths a year? (d) Why does the chapter say that the true origin of noodles and spaghetti may never be known?

Answer: (a) 6 of 10, or 60 per cent: potatoes, tomatoes, groundnuts, maize, chillies and sweet potatoes; (b) 3,000,000; (c) 200,000 a year; (d) spaghetti may be noodles that came west from China, or Arab traders may have taken pasta to Sicily in the fifth century, and India and Japan had similar dishes too. (a) The chapter's list is on page 54: our ancestors did not know these foods until roughly 500 years ago. 6 ÷ 10 = 60 per cent. (b) Emigrated: 2 × 1,000,000 = 2,000,000; 1,000,000 + 2,000,000 = 3,000,000 (Fig. 4 caption, page 55). (c) 1845 to 1849 is 5 years, and 1,000,000 ÷ 5 = 200,000. The page 55 text says only "hundreds of thousands" died; the caption's figure is the larger one, and the sum uses it. (d) Page 54: even guesswork about the dish shows how far cultural contact reached in the pre-modern world. (The menu is our own.)

How the centre of world trade moved

Question 4. (a) Which region does the chapter say was central to the busy Indian Ocean trade before the Europeans arrived, and what did the Europeans' entry do to its flows? (b) Name the two Asian countries the chapter counts among the world's richest until well into the eighteenth century, and give the two changes that moved the centre of world trade westwards. (c) Give three things in America that drew Europe after the sixteenth century, as the chapter tells it. (d) The caption of Fig. 5, an auction in New Orleans in 1851, counts the people waiting to be sold. How many are there, and which crops did the chapter say slave labour grew, and for whom?

Answer: (a) the Indian subcontinent, a crucial point in the networks; the Europeans helped expand some flows and redirect others towards Europe; (b) China and India; China restricted its overseas contacts from the fifteenth century, and the Americas rose in importance, so Europe became the centre of world trade; (c) its vast lands, its abundant crops and its minerals, above all silver, with legends of a city of gold, El Dorado; (d) 13 people (two children, four women and seven men); cotton and sugar, for European markets. (a) Page 55. (b) Page 56. (c) Page 55. (d) 2 + 4 + 7 = 13 (Fig. 5 caption, page 56); the plantations, worked by slaves captured in Africa, are on page 56.

Assertion and reason

Question 5. For each pair, choose: (A) both true, and R explains A; (B) both true, but R does not explain A; (C) A true, R false; (D) A false, R true.

  1. A: Guns gave the conquerors of America a less lasting advantage than smallpox did. R: A gun could change hands, by sale or capture, and be used against the invaders; but the conquerors were mostly immune to smallpox.
  2. A: The silk routes carried only goods, never people or beliefs. R: Early Christian missionaries and, later, Muslim preachers almost certainly travelled the silk routes.
  3. A: Europe emerged as the centre of world trade after China withdrew from overseas contact. R: The potato helped Europe's poor eat better and live longer.

Answer: 1 (A); 2 (D); 3 (B). (1) Both are true, and R is the reason: a weapon could change hands, but a disease the invaders were immune to could not be turned against them (page 56). (2) A is false: the chapter says exchange of trade and of culture always travelled together, and Buddhism also spread through points on the silk routes. R is true (page 54). (3) Both are true (pages 55 and 56), but the potato's effect on Europe's diet is not what moved the centre of trade.

The three flows in numbers (project part)

This part of the chapter is assessed through the school project, not the board paper.

Question 6. (a) The chapter says world trade multiplied 25 to 40 times between 1820 and 1914, and nearly 60 per cent of it was primary products. If world trade in 1820 is taken as 100, what range does it reach by 1914, and how much of that is primary products? (b) In the nineteenth century, nearly 50 million Europeans left for America and Australia, out of some 150 million worldwide who left home. What fraction is that? (c) Rinderpest wiped out 90 per cent of the cattle it reached. A made-up village has 2,400 cattle; how many survive? (d) It reached Africa's Atlantic coast in 1892 and the Cape five years later: in what year? (e) Which of the chapter's three flows do (a) and (b) each describe, and how does the chapter say rinderpest first got into Africa?

Answer: (a) 2,500 to 4,000, of which about 1,500 to 2,400 is primary products; (b) one third; (c) 240; (d) 1897; (e) (a) is the flow of trade and (b) the flow of labour; rinderpest came in the late 1880s with infected cattle brought from British Asia to feed Italian soldiers invading Eritrea, and entered Africa in the east. (a) 100 × 25 = 2,500 and 100 × 40 = 4,000; 60 per cent of each is 1,500 and 2,400 (page 59). (b) 50 ÷ 150 = 1/3 (page 58). (c) 2,400 × 0.90 = 2,160 die, so 240 survive (page 63). (d) 1892 + 5 = 1897 (page 63). (e) The three flows, trade, labour and capital, are named on page 57; rinderpest's arrival and its westward spread are on page 63. (The index of 100 and the village are our own.)

India's exports under colonial rule (project part)

Question 7. (a) Cotton textiles made up some 30 per cent of India's exports around 1800, 15 per cent by 1815, and below 3 per cent by the 1870s. If India's exports were a made-up 200 units in 1800, what were cotton textiles worth? By 1815, what had happened to their share? If exports were 500 units in the 1870s, at most how much were cotton textiles? (b) Raw cotton rose from 5 per cent of exports in 1812 to 35 per cent in 1871. How many times larger was its share? (c) In a made-up year, Britain has a trade deficit of 40 with one country and 25 with another, and a trade surplus of 70 with India. Can India's surplus cover both deficits, and what is left? What does the chapter call this arrangement? (d) Name three things paid for by the 'home charges'.

Answer: (a) 60 units; the share had halved; under 15 units; (b) 7 times; (c) yes, with 5 left over; a multilateral settlement system, in which one country's deficit with another is settled by its surplus with a third; (d) money that British officials and traders sent home, interest on India's debts abroad, and the pensions of British officials who had served in India. (a) 200 × 0.30 = 60; 15 ÷ 30 = 1/2; 500 × 0.03 = 15 (page 66). (b) 35 ÷ 5 = 7 (page 66). (c) 70 − (40 + 25) = 5. Page 67: because India's surplus helped Britain balance its deficits, the chapter says India mattered a great deal to the world economy of the late nineteenth century. (d) Page 67. (The 200 and 500 units and the deficits are our own.)

The inter-war years in numbers (project part)

Question 8. (a) In January 1914 Henry Ford doubled the daily wage to $5. What had it been? If cars came off his assembly line every three minutes, how many came off in an 8-hour shift? (b) US overseas loans came to over $1 billion in the first half of 1928; a year later they were a quarter of that. Roughly how much was that, and by what percentage had they fallen? (c) Between 1928 and 1934 the price of wheat in India halved. A made-up peasant sells 30 maunds of wheat at Rs 6 a maund in 1928 and pays a fixed Rs 60 in revenue. What does he have left after revenue in 1928, and in 1934? By what percentage did that fall? (d) At least 60 million people, about 3 per cent of all the people alive in 1939, died because of the Second World War. What does that make the world's population in 1939?

Answer: (a) about $2.50; 160 cars; (b) about $250 million, a fall of 75 per cent; (c) Rs 120 in 1928 and Rs 30 in 1934, a fall of 75 per cent; (d) about 2,000 million, or 2 billion. (a) 5 ÷ 2 = 2.50; 8 × 60 ÷ 3 = 160 (page 70). (b) 1,000 ÷ 4 = 250; 100 − 25 = 75 (pages 71 to 72). (c) 1928: 30 × 6 = 180, and 180 − 60 = 120. 1934: 30 × 3 = 90, and 90 − 60 = 30. (120 − 30) ÷ 120 = 75 per cent. The price fell by half, but the money left fell by three-quarters because the colonial government would not lower the revenue it demanded (page 73). (d) 60 ÷ 0.03 = 2,000 (page 74). (The peasant, his wheat and his revenue 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 and figures are from the textbook pages above. The questions, worked answers, the sums and the examples marked as ours are our own. This guide is general information; follow your teacher and the official CBSE notices.

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