IMAT Reading Skills and General Knowledge · Free notes
History: A Revision Checklist from Antiquity to the European Union
History has 23 past questions since 2011, and the ministry papers from 2023 on have asked 2 of them. There is no fixed syllabus, so every question is pure recall of something a European secondary school student is expected to know: a date, a name, a treaty, the author of a famous work. The ministry questions so far have been about ancient Rome and the late Middle Ages, while the older papers leaned heavily on the history of science and medicine. The difficulty is breadth, not depth: learn one anchor date and one fact per event in the tables, and use the dates to answer the ordering and odd-one-out questions.
The handout has every subtopic, worked example, formula and trap with answers shown. The formula sheet is the chapter’s formulas and traps alone, on one page.
Subtopic notes
The Ancient World: Early Civilisations, Greece and Rome
0 PYQsThe first civilisations invented writing; Greece gave Europe the city-state and democracy; Rome built an empire and a Latin literature that schools still read.
Middle Ages, Renaissance and the Age of Exploration
0 PYQsFrom the fall of Rome to the voyages of Columbus: feudal Europe, the Crusades and the plague, then printing, the Renaissance, the Reformation and new sea routes.
Enlightenment, Revolutions and the Unification of Italy and Germany
0 PYQsEnlightenment ideas fed the American and French revolutions, industry transformed Britain, and in the 1800s Italy and Germany became single nations.
The World Wars, the Cold War and European Integration
0 PYQsTwo world wars, the Russian Revolution, a long Cold War between the USA and the USSR, the end of the colonial empires and the building of the European Union.
History of Science, Medicine and Great Prizes
0 PYQsWho discovered what, and when: the doctors, astronomers and physicists a medical student is expected to know, plus the Nobel Prizes and other famous awards.
Formula & revision sheet
0 formulas · 19 reference tables · 20 gotchas across all subtopics — the exam-eve cheat-sheet
Formula & revision sheet
0 formulas · 19 reference tables · 20 gotchas across all subtopics — the exam-eve cheat-sheet
Reference tables (5)
Early civilisations and the birth of writing8 rows
| Civilisation or object | Where (modern country) | Fact to remember |
|---|---|---|
| Sumerians | Southern Iraq | Cuneiform, one of the first writing systems, about 3200 BC |
| Babylon under Hammurabi | Iraq | Code of Hammurabi, a written law code of about 1750 BC ("an eye for an eye") |
| Ancient Egypt | Egypt, along the Nile | Hieroglyphs; the pyramids of Giza, built about 2500 BC |
| Rosetta Stone | Found in Egypt in 1799; now in the British Museum | One decree in hieroglyphs, Demotic and Greek; Champollion deciphered hieroglyphs in 1822 |
| Phoenicians | Lebanon coast; founded Carthage in Tunisia | Consonant alphabet, ancestor of the Greek and Latin alphabets |
| Maya | Southern Mexico, Guatemala | Hieroglyphic writing, precise calendar and astronomy |
| Aztecs | Central Mexico; capital Tenochtitlan (now Mexico City) | Conquered by Hernán Cortés in 1521 |
| Incas | Andes, centred on Peru; capital Cusco | Machu Picchu; conquered by Francisco Pizarro from 1532 |
The Seven Wonders of the Ancient World7 rows
| Wonder | Where (today) | What happened to it |
|---|---|---|
| Great Pyramid of Giza | Egypt | Still standing: the only survivor |
| Hanging Gardens of Babylon | Iraq | Lost; some historians doubt they existed |
| Statue of Zeus at Olympia | Greece | Destroyed in late antiquity |
| Temple of Artemis at Ephesus | Turkey | Burnt and destroyed; a few ruins |
| Mausoleum at Halicarnassus | Bodrum, Turkey | Destroyed by earthquakes; gave us the word "mausoleum" |
| Colossus of Rhodes | Greece | Bronze statue of the sun god Helios, fell in an earthquake soon after it was built |
| Lighthouse (Pharos) of Alexandria | Egypt | Destroyed by earthquakes in the Middle Ages |
Classical Greece: the polis, democracy and Alexander7 rows
| Event or term | Date | What to remember |
|---|---|---|
| First Olympic Games | 776 BC | Held at Olympia in honour of Zeus |
| Reforms of Cleisthenes | 508 BC | Start of democracy in Athens |
| Persian Wars | 490 to 479 BC | Greek victories at Marathon (490), Salamis (480, at sea) and Plataea (479); the Spartans' last stand at Thermopylae (480) |
| Age of Pericles | About 461 to 429 BC | Golden age of Athens; the Parthenon built on the Acropolis |
| Peloponnesian War | 431 to 404 BC | Athens against Sparta; Sparta won |
| Alexander the Great | Reigned 336 to 323 BC | King of Macedon, pupil of Aristotle; conquered Persia and reached India; founded Alexandria in Egypt |
| Hellenistic age | 323 to 31 BC | Greek culture across the East; ended when Rome took Egypt after the battle of Actium |
Rome from foundation to fall: the key dates8 rows
| Date | Event | Why it matters |
|---|---|---|
| 753 BC | Legendary founding of Rome by Romulus | Romans counted years from it (ab urbe condita) |
| 509 BC | Last king expelled | The Republic begins |
| 264 to 146 BC | Three Punic Wars against Carthage | Hannibal of Carthage crossed the Alps with elephants in 218 BC; Carthage destroyed in 146 BC |
| 49 to 44 BC | Julius Caesar crosses the Rubicon, becomes dictator, is murdered on the Ides of March (15 March 44 BC) | The Republic collapses in civil war |
| 27 BC | Octavian receives the title Augustus | First emperor; start of the Pax Romana |
| AD 79 | Vesuvius erupts | Pompeii and Herculaneum buried |
| AD 313 | Edict of Milan by Constantine | Christianity tolerated; made the state religion by Theodosius in 380 |
| AD 476 | Last Western emperor, Romulus Augustulus, deposed by Odoacer | Conventional end of the Western Empire and of antiquity |
Latin authors and their major works10 rows
| Author | Main work | What it is |
|---|---|---|
| Julius Caesar | De Bello Gallico (Commentaries on the Gallic War) | Caesar's own prose account of his conquest of Gaul, 58 to 50 BC, written in the third person |
| Cicero | Speeches against Catiline; De Re Publica; letters | Orator and statesman; the model of Latin prose style |
| Lucretius | De Rerum Natura | Poem explaining the Epicurean view that everything is made of atoms |
| Virgil | Aeneid; Georgics; Eclogues | Epic of Aeneas, who flees Troy and founds the Roman line in Italy; Dante's guide in the Divine Comedy |
| Horace | Odes; Satires; Ars Poetica | Lyric poet of the age of Augustus; source of "carpe diem" |
| Ovid | Metamorphoses | Poem of myths about transformations; Ovid was exiled by Augustus |
| Livy | Ab Urbe Condita | History of Rome from its founding |
| Seneca | Letters to Lucilius; tragedies | Stoic philosopher and tutor of the emperor Nero |
| Pliny the Elder | Naturalis Historia | Encyclopedia of the natural world; he died in the eruption of Vesuvius, AD 79 |
| Tacitus | Annals; Histories; Germania | Historian of the early emperors and of the Germanic peoples |
Watch out for (6)
- Hieroglyphs belong to Egypt, cuneiform to Mesopotamia→ Early civilisations and the birth of writing
- Famous does not mean one of the Seven→ The Seven Wonders of the Ancient World
- Ancient democracy was direct, and narrow→ Classical Greece: the polis, democracy and Alexander
- Hannibal was Rome's enemy, not a Roman→ Rome from foundation to fall: the key dates
- Caesar was never emperor→ Rome from foundation to fall: the key dates
- De Bello Gallico is Caesar's prose, not a poem→ Latin authors and their major works
Reference tables (3)
Key events of the Middle Ages9 rows
| Date | Event | Fact to remember |
|---|---|---|
| 622 | Muhammad moves from Mecca to Medina (the Hijra) | Year 1 of the Islamic calendar |
| 800 | Charlemagne, king of the Franks, crowned emperor in Rome on Christmas Day | Crowned by Pope Leo III |
| 1054 | Great Schism | Split between the Catholic Church (Rome) and the Orthodox Church (Constantinople) |
| 1066 | Norman conquest of England | William the Conqueror wins the battle of Hastings |
| 1096 to 1291 | The Crusades | The First Crusade took Jerusalem in 1099 |
| 1215 | Magna Carta | King John of England accepts that the king is under the law |
| 1337 to 1453 | Hundred Years' War | England against France; Joan of Arc; France wins and England keeps only Calais |
| 1347 to 1351 | Black Death | Bubonic plague kills between a third and a half of Europe's people |
| 1453 | Ottoman Turks capture Constantinople | End of the Byzantine Empire; often used as the end of the Middle Ages |
Renaissance and Reformation9 rows
| Date | Person or event | Fact to remember |
|---|---|---|
| About 1450 | Johannes Gutenberg in Mainz | Printing with movable metal type; the Gutenberg Bible, about 1455 |
| 1469 to 1492 | Lorenzo de' Medici (il Magnifico) rules Florence | Patron of Botticelli and the young Michelangelo |
| About 1495 to 1519 | Leonardo da Vinci | The Last Supper (Milan), the Mona Lisa, anatomical drawings |
| 1508 to 1512 | Michelangelo paints the Sistine Chapel ceiling | Also the marble David (1504) |
| 1513 | Machiavelli writes The Prince | Published in 1532, after his death |
| 1517 | Martin Luther's 95 Theses, Wittenberg | Against the sale of indulgences; start of the Reformation |
| 1534 | Act of Supremacy | Henry VIII makes himself head of the Church of England |
| 1545 to 1563 | Council of Trent | Catholic Counter-Reformation |
| 1618 to 1648 | Thirty Years' War | Religious and political war in Germany; ended by the Peace of Westphalia (1648) |
The age of exploration and the conquest of the Americas7 rows
| Date | Explorer or event | Achievement |
|---|---|---|
| 1488 | Bartolomeu Dias (Portugal) | First to sail round the Cape of Good Hope |
| 1492 | Christopher Columbus (for Spain) | Reached the Caribbean (the Bahamas, then Cuba and Hispaniola) |
| 1494 | Treaty of Tordesillas | Divided new lands between Spain and Portugal |
| 1498 | Vasco da Gama (Portugal) | First sea voyage from Europe to India, round Africa |
| 1500 | Pedro Álvares Cabral (Portugal) | Reached Brazil |
| 1519 to 1522 | Ferdinand Magellan's expedition (for Spain) | First circumnavigation of the globe; Magellan was killed in the Philippines and Elcano finished the voyage |
| 1521 and 1532 | Hernán Cortés and Francisco Pizarro | Spanish conquest of the Aztec and Inca empires |
Watch out for (3)
- The Hundred Years' War did not involve Spain or Portugal→ Key events of the Middle Ages
- Henry VIII broke with Rome for political reasons, not Lutheran doctrine→ Renaissance and Reformation
- Magellan did not complete his own circumnavigation→ The age of exploration and the conquest of the Americas
Reference tables (3)
The Enlightenment: thinkers and ideas7 rows
| Thinker | Country | Key idea or work |
|---|---|---|
| John Locke | England | Natural rights to life, liberty and property; government needs the consent of the governed (Two Treatises of Government, 1689) |
| Montesquieu | France | Separation of legislative, executive and judicial powers (The Spirit of the Laws, 1748) |
| Voltaire | France | Religious tolerance and free speech; the satire Candide (1759) |
| Jean-Jacques Rousseau | Born in Geneva, worked in France | The Social Contract (1762): sovereignty belongs to the people and their "general will" |
| Diderot and d'Alembert | France | The Encyclopédie (from 1751), a summary of all knowledge |
| Cesare Beccaria | Milan | On Crimes and Punishments (1764): against torture and the death penalty |
| Immanuel Kant | Prussia | Essay "What is Enlightenment?" (1784): "Sapere aude", dare to use your own reason |
The age of revolutions, 1688 to 18489 rows
| Date | Event | Fact to remember |
|---|---|---|
| 1688 to 1689 | Glorious Revolution, England | Bill of Rights 1689: Parliament stands above the king |
| From about 1760 | Industrial Revolution begins in Britain | James Watt's improved steam engine (patented 1769) |
| 4 July 1776 | American Declaration of Independence | Written mainly by Thomas Jefferson; US Constitution 1787; George Washington first president in 1789 |
| 14 July 1789 | Storming of the Bastille, Paris | Start of the French Revolution; Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen in August 1789 |
| 1793 to 1794 | The Terror | Louis XVI executed in January 1793; Robespierre's rule |
| 1804 | Napoleon crowned Emperor of the French | Napoleonic Civil Code the same year |
| 1815 | Battle of Waterloo; Congress of Vienna (1814 to 1815) | Napoleon exiled to Saint Helena; old monarchies restored |
| 1848 | Revolutions across Europe ("Springtime of the Peoples") | Marx and Engels publish The Communist Manifesto |
| 1861 to 1865 | American Civil War | Abraham Lincoln; slavery abolished in the USA in 1865 |
The unification of Italy and of Germany8 rows
| Date | Event | Key figure |
|---|---|---|
| 1848 to 1849 | First Italian War of Independence, lost to Austria | Charles Albert, king of Piedmont-Sardinia |
| 1859 | Second War of Independence: Lombardy won | Cavour, allied with Napoleon III of France |
| 1860 | Expedition of the Thousand conquers the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies | Giuseppe Garibaldi |
| 17 March 1861 | Kingdom of Italy proclaimed | Victor Emmanuel II, first king of Italy |
| 1866 | Third War of Independence: Venetia joins Italy | Italy allied with Prussia against Austria |
| 20 September 1870 | Rome taken (the breach of Porta Pia); capital from 1871 | End of the Pope's temporal power |
| 1864 to 1871 | Prussian wars against Denmark, Austria and France | Otto von Bismarck |
| 18 January 1871 | German Empire proclaimed in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles | Wilhelm I of Prussia, first German Kaiser |
Watch out for (3)
- Reason, not faith or feeling→ The Enlightenment: thinkers and ideas
- The American Revolution came before the French one→ The age of revolutions, 1688 to 1848
- Italy was united as a monarchy, not a republic→ The unification of Italy and of Germany
Reference tables (4)
The First World War and the Russian Revolution7 rows
| Date | Event | Fact to remember |
|---|---|---|
| 28 June 1914 | Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria assassinated in Sarajevo | The trigger of the war |
| 1914 to 1918 | First World War | Trench warfare on the Western Front |
| 24 May 1915 | Italy enters the war against Austria | Defeat at Caporetto (1917); victory at Vittorio Veneto (1918) |
| 1917 | February and October Revolutions in Russia | Lenin and the Bolsheviks take power; the USSR is formed in 1922 |
| 1917 | USA enters the war | President Woodrow Wilson |
| 11 November 1918 | Armistice ends the fighting | Germany signs in a railway carriage at Compiègne |
| 1919 | Treaty of Versailles | Germany loses land and pays reparations; League of Nations founded (1920) |
Between the wars and the Second World War9 rows
| Date | Event | Fact to remember |
|---|---|---|
| October 1922 | March on Rome | Mussolini becomes prime minister; dictatorship from 1925 |
| October 1929 | Wall Street Crash | Start of the Great Depression |
| January 1933 | Hitler becomes chancellor of Germany | Nazi dictatorship follows within months |
| 1 September 1939 | Germany invades Poland | Britain and France declare war on 3 September |
| 10 June 1940 | Italy enters the war | France falls the same month |
| 1941 | Germany invades the USSR (June); Japan attacks Pearl Harbor (7 December) | The USSR and the USA enter the war |
| 1943 | Allies land in Sicily; Mussolini removed on 25 July; armistice announced on 8 September | Germany occupies northern and central Italy; the Resistance begins |
| 6 June 1944 | D-Day: Allied landings in Normandy | Opens the Western front in France |
| 1945 | Liberation of Italy (25 April); German surrender (8 May); atomic bombs on Hiroshima (6 August) and Nagasaki (9 August); Japan surrenders (2 September) | End of the war; the United Nations founded |
The Cold War, the space race and decolonisation10 rows
| Date | Event | Fact to remember |
|---|---|---|
| 1947 | India and Pakistan become independent | Gandhi is assassinated in January 1948 |
| 1949 | NATO founded; Germany divided; People's Republic of China proclaimed by Mao | The Cold War takes shape |
| October 1957 | USSR launches Sputnik 1 | First artificial satellite; start of the space race |
| 12 April 1961 | Yuri Gagarin orbits the Earth | First human in space (USSR) |
| August 1961 | Berlin Wall built | Divides East and West Berlin |
| October 1962 | Cuban Missile Crisis | Closest the superpowers came to nuclear war |
| 20 July 1969 | Apollo 11: Neil Armstrong walks on the Moon | First humans on the Moon (USA) |
| 9 November 1989 | Fall of the Berlin Wall | Germany reunited on 3 October 1990 |
| December 1991 | USSR dissolved | End of the Cold War |
| 1994 | Nelson Mandela elected president of South Africa | End of apartheid |
How the European Union was built, treaty by treaty10 rows
| Year | Treaty or step | What it did |
|---|---|---|
| 1951 | Treaty of Paris | Created the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC) |
| 1957 | Treaties of Rome | Created the European Economic Community (EEC) and Euratom |
| 1973 | First enlargement | United Kingdom, Ireland and Denmark join |
| 1979 | First direct elections to the European Parliament | Citizens vote for MEPs |
| 1985 | Schengen Agreement | Removal of internal border checks (in force from 1995) |
| 1992 | Treaty of Maastricht (in force 1993) | Created the European Union and planned the euro |
| 1999 and 2002 | Euro launched | Electronic money in 1999; notes and coins on 1 January 2002 |
| 2004 | Largest enlargement | Ten countries join, mostly from Central and Eastern Europe |
| 2007 (in force 2009) | Treaty of Lisbon | Current rules of the EU; a permanent President of the European Council |
| 31 January 2020 | Brexit | The United Kingdom leaves; 27 members remain |
Watch out for (4)
- The October Revolution happened in November→ The First World War and the Russian Revolution
- The war in Europe and the war in the Pacific ended at different times→ Between the wars and the Second World War
- First in orbit, first on the Moon, first woman: three different people→ The Cold War, the space race and decolonisation
- Paris made the ECSC, Rome made the EEC→ How the European Union was built, treaty by treaty
Reference tables (4)
Milestones in the history of medicine12 rows
| Person | Place and date | Contribution |
|---|---|---|
| Hippocrates | Kos, Greece, about 460 to 370 BC | Father of Western medicine; the Hippocratic Oath |
| Galen | Greek doctor in Rome, 2nd century AD | Anatomy and physiology from animal dissection; the theory of the four humours |
| Avicenna (Ibn Sina) | Persia, about 1025 | The Canon of Medicine, a standard textbook in Europe for centuries |
| Andreas Vesalius | Padua, 1543 | De humani corporis fabrica: modern human anatomy |
| William Harvey | England, 1628 | De Motu Cordis: the heart pumps blood round a closed circulation |
| Edward Jenner | England, 1796 | First vaccine, against smallpox, using cowpox |
| Ignaz Semmelweis | Vienna, 1847 | Handwashing by doctors cut deaths from childbed fever |
| Louis Pasteur | France, 1860s to 1885 | Germ theory, pasteurisation, rabies vaccine |
| Joseph Lister | Britain, 1867 | Antiseptic surgery using carbolic acid |
| Robert Koch | Germany, 1882 | Identified the tuberculosis bacterium; Koch's postulates |
| Alexander Fleming | London, 1928 | Discovered penicillin, the first antibiotic |
| James Watson and Francis Crick | Cambridge, 1953 | Double-helix structure of DNA, using Rosalind Franklin's X-ray images |
Astronomy and the Scientific Revolution, Ptolemy to Newton7 rows
| Scientist | Place and date | Contribution |
|---|---|---|
| Claudius Ptolemy | Alexandria, 2nd century AD | The Almagest: an Earth-centred model of the universe |
| Nicolaus Copernicus | Poland, 1543 | De revolutionibus: a Sun-centred model |
| Galileo Galilei | Pisa and Padua, 1609 to 1610 | Improved the telescope; discovered four moons of Jupiter; regular swing of the pendulum |
| Johannes Kepler | Germany and Prague, 1609 to 1619 | Three laws of planetary motion: orbits are ellipses |
| Evangelista Torricelli | Florence, 1643 | Mercury barometer |
| Isaac Newton | England, 1687 | Principia: three laws of motion and universal gravitation; also calculus and optics |
| Carl Friedrich Gauss | Germany, early 1800s | The normal (Gaussian) distribution; number theory |
Physics, chemistry and biology from Volta to Einstein12 rows
| Scientist | Date | Discovery or invention |
|---|---|---|
| Alessandro Volta | 1800 | Electric battery (the voltaic pile) |
| Michael Faraday | 1831 | Electromagnetic induction, the basis of generators |
| Charles Darwin | 1859 | On the Origin of Species: evolution by natural selection |
| Gregor Mendel | 1866 | Laws of inheritance, from pea plants |
| Dmitri Mendeleev | 1869 | Periodic table of the elements |
| Wilhelm Röntgen | 1895 | X-rays; first Nobel Prize in Physics (1901) |
| Henri Becquerel | 1896 | Radioactivity, from uranium salts |
| Marie and Pierre Curie | 1898 | Polonium and radium; study of radioactivity |
| Albert Einstein | 1905 and 1915 | Special and general relativity; E = mc²; the photoelectric effect |
| Hans Geiger | 1908 to 1928 | Radiation detector (the Geiger counter, with Müller) |
| Niels Bohr | 1913 | Model of the atom with electrons in fixed orbits |
| Ernst Ruska and Max Knoll | 1931 | The electron microscope |
Nobel Prizes, other great awards and famous firsts7 rows
| Prize or person | Field or achievement | Remember |
|---|---|---|
| Marie Curie | Nobel in Physics (1903) and Chemistry (1911) | First woman to win a Nobel; only person with Nobels in two different sciences |
| Fields Medal | Mathematics | Every four years, to mathematicians under 40 |
| Pulitzer Prize | US journalism, fiction, drama and music | Since 1917, run by Columbia University in New York |
| Turing Award | Computer science | Named after Alan Turing |
| Mahatma Gandhi | Leader of India's non-violent independence movement | Nominated several times but never awarded the Nobel Peace Prize |
| Nobel Peace laureates often asked | Martin Luther King (1964), Willy Brandt (1971), Aung San Suu Kyi (1991), Nelson Mandela (1993), Malala Yousafzai (2014) | Malala was 17: the youngest laureate |
| Rita Levi-Montalcini | Nobel in Physiology or Medicine (1986) | Italian neurologist; discovered nerve growth factor |
Watch out for (4)
- Philosophers are not the father of medicine→ Milestones in the history of medicine
- Galileo did not invent the battery or discover gravity's law→ Astronomy and the Scientific Revolution, Ptolemy to Newton
- Uranium was not discovered by the Curies→ Physics, chemistry and biology from Volta to Einstein
- Famous peacemaker is not the same as Nobel laureate→ Nobel Prizes, other great awards and famous firsts
PYQ weightage by concept
19 concepts · 0 PYQs — where the marks actually sit, so you know what to drill first
PYQ weightage by concept
19 concepts · 0 PYQs — where the marks actually sit, so you know what to drill first
| Concept | PYQs | Share |
|---|---|---|
| Early civilisations and the birth of writingfoundation | — | — |
| The Seven Wonders of the Ancient Worldfoundation | — | — |
| Classical Greece: the polis, democracy and Alexanderfoundation | — | — |
| Rome from foundation to fall: the key datesfoundation | — | — |
| Latin authors and their major worksfoundation | — | — |
| Concept | PYQs | Share |
|---|---|---|
| Key events of the Middle Agesfoundation | — | — |
| Renaissance and Reformationfoundation | — | — |
| The age of exploration and the conquest of the Americasfoundation | — | — |
| Concept | PYQs | Share |
|---|---|---|
| The Enlightenment: thinkers and ideasfoundation | — | — |
| The age of revolutions, 1688 to 1848foundation | — | — |
| The unification of Italy and of Germanyfoundation | — | — |
| Concept | PYQs | Share |
|---|---|---|
| The First World War and the Russian Revolutionfoundation | — | — |
| Between the wars and the Second World Warfoundation | — | — |
| The Cold War, the space race and decolonisationfoundation | — | — |
| How the European Union was built, treaty by treatyfoundation | — | — |
| Concept | PYQs | Share |
|---|---|---|
| Milestones in the history of medicinefoundation | — | — |
| Astronomy and the Scientific Revolution, Ptolemy to Newtonfoundation | — | — |
| Physics, chemistry and biology from Volta to Einsteinfoundation | — | — |
| Nobel Prizes, other great awards and famous firstsfoundation | — | — |