History: modern Britain, 1918–2013

Twenty questions on the twentieth century beyond the two world wars. The wars themselves, votes for women, the NHS and Beveridge, Windrush, Thatcher, the EEC, devolution, the Good Friday Agreement, and Fleming, Crick and Watson and Turing are in this category's third history quiz. This one covers what happened around them, up to the edition of the handbook the test is set from.

Between the wars and after

The Depression of the 1930s and the unemployment it brought to the old industries; Clement Attlee's government of 1945 to 1951, which built the welfare state; the 1944 Education Act and free secondary education for all.

The end of empire

Independence for India and Pakistan in 1947, others following in the 1950s and 1960s, and the Commonwealth that most former colonies joined.

A changing society

The social reforms of the late 1960s, the Equal Pay Act of 1970, the Troubles in Northern Ireland, the Falklands War of 1982, Labour's victory under Tony Blair in 1997 and the coalition of 2010. Questions about decades are set so that the wrong options are real events from other decades — the dates are the answer.

British inventions

Nine inventions and the people behind them: Whittle and the jet engine, Watson-Watt and radar, Baird and television, Cockerell and the hovercraft, Edwards and Steptoe and IVF, the Roslin Institute and Dolly the sheep, Mansfield and MRI, Berners-Lee and the World Wide Web, Shepherd-Barron and the cash machine. Learning them as pairs is the whole task.

Question types follow the real test: single answer and 'which of these statements is true?'.

How this differs from test day

This is a quiz only: twenty questions on one period, each followed by an explanation that names why the right answer is right and where each wrong one really belongs. The real test is different in shape: 24 questions drawn from the whole handbook, on a computer, in 45 minutes, with no feedback until the end. Use this to find the facts that will not stick, then go back to them — not as a stand-in for the test itself.

The questions and explanations here are Zestly's own, written from publicly known facts. No text is reproduced from the official handbook, which is a separate copyrighted publication and the only real syllabus.

• Describe the Depression of the 1930s and the Attlee government's welfare state
• Explain what the 1944 Education Act and the Equal Pay Act of 1970 did
• Date Indian independence and say what the Commonwealth is
• Place the Troubles, the Falklands War, 1997 and the 2010 coalition
• Match twentieth-century British inventors to their inventions

Practice material written by Zestly from publicly known facts of British history, for the period covered by the Life in the UK history chapter. No text is reproduced from the handbook Life in the United Kingdom: A Guide for New Residents.