Multiple Choice Quizzes: English and American Literature and History

After working on this for months, we are finally ready to launch our brand new and highly anticipated database: Multiple Choice Quizzes on English and American Literature and History!

We received dozens of requests from teachers for a database like this to practise for the upcoming concorso ordinario A24 and A25, and it’s now ready.

In this article, you’ll find the answers to the key questions about our database:

1. When is the database going to be available?
2. What does the database include?
3. How does the database work?
4. How many times can I take the quizzes?
5. Can I try the quizzes for free?
6. Where can I study the topics covered in the questions?
7. What topics are covered?
8. Can I get a discount?

1. When is the database going to be available?

Mark your calendar: the database will be available from Wednesday, 23 February – but it’s already ready for pre-order, if you like!

2. What does the database include?

The database includes:

• 300 multiple choice questions
• 300 brief explanations, one for each question, detailing why your answers are correct/incorrect
• References to books and links where you can revise the various topics
• A final bonus unit with a sample lesson plan and a lesson plan template

3. How does the database work?

This is not a course per se, but a database of 300 multiple choice questions that you can take to consolidate your existing knowledge and identify topics you need to revise.

Every time you answer a question, a brief explanation will pop up, as shown in this video:

4. How many times can I take the quizzes?

As many times as you like!

5. Can I try the quizzes for free?

Of course: we always want you to know what you’re buying before you start a course. Just go to the free preview and try one of the randomised quizzes or try our free history quiz!

6. Where can I study the topics covered in the questions?

There is a general bibliography for the full course, featuring free websites and books + a dedicated bibliography with free links in each unit, specific to the topics covered in each unit.

7. What topics are covered?

The quizzes cover English and American literature and history. There are 13 quizzes in the database, for a total of 300 questions and 300 explanations.

Units 1-5 cover British literature and history, with questions on both literature and history in the same quizzes. Unit 6 is about American literature and history.

The topics and sub-topics are of course not an exhaustive list of topics to study, but they have been chosen selectively as follows:

Unit 1 – Old and Middle English

Old English

• Roman occupation of Britain
• Anglo-Saxon invasions
• Languages after the Conquest
• Old English poetry
• Beowulf
• The Dream of the Rood

Middle English

• Middle English language
• The Wars of the Roses
• The Lais
• Geoffrey Chaucer
• John Gower
• Middle English drama

Unit 2 – The Renaissance

The Renaissance

• Henry VIII
• The English Reformation
• The Elizabethan age
• The Gunpowder plot
• Elizabethan drama
• Elizabethan poetry
• Language in Elizabethan times
• Francis Bacon
• Thomas More
• Philip Sidney
• Edmund Spenser
• Christopher Marlowe
• Philip Sidney

Shakespeare

• William Shakespeare (dedicated quiz on life and works)

The Early Stuart Period

• James VI
• The English Civil Wars
• The Metaphysical Poets
• The Cavalier Poets
• Theatres in the 17th century

Unit 3 – From the Restoration to Romanticism

The Restoration

• The Restoration
• Thomas Hobbes
• Restoration drama
• John Locke
• Samuel Pepys
• John Milton
• John Dryden

The 18th century

• The Acts of Union
• Journalism in the 18th century
• Alexander Pope
• Jonathan Swift
• Daniel Defoe
• Samuel Richardson
• Henry Fielding
• Laurence Sterne
• Thomas Gray
• Samuel Johnson

The Romantic Period

• The Industrial Revolution
• The Napoleonic Wars
• The Reform Acts
• The Act of Union
• Romanticism
• Romantic poetry
• The novel during the Romantic period
• Benjamin Disraeli
• William Blake
• William Wordsworth
• Samuel Taylor Coleridge
• John Keats
• Percy Bysshe Shelley
• Mary Wollstonecraft
• Lord Byron
• Jane Austen
• Walter Scott

Unit 4 – The 19th century

The 19th century and the Victorian Age

• Queen Victoria
• Social and economic conditions in the Victorian Age
• The publishing industry in the Victorian Age
• Charles Dickens
• Charles Darwin
• William Makepeace Thackeray
• The Brontë sisters
• George Eliot
• Alfred Tennyson
• Oscar Wilde
• Robert Louis Stevenson
• The Pre-Raphaelites

Unit 5 – The 20th century

From 1900 to 1930s

• The Suffragettes
• Anglo-French relations
• Women’s right to vote
• Social policy in the UK
• The Imagist movement
• The Bloomsbury Group
• The trench poets
• The Boer War
• H.G. Wells
• George Bernard Shaw
• Joseph Conrad
• Beatrix Potter
• W.B. Yeats
• T.S. Eliot
• Ezra Pound
• D.H. Lawrence
• E.M. Forster
• James Joyce
• Aldous Huxley
• Virginia Woolf

From the 1940s to the present day

• Decolonisation
• World War II
• Neville Chamberlain
• The post-war period
• The Marshall Plan
• Margaret Thatcher
• The Troubles
• Tony Blair
• Brexit
• Diana Spencer
• Winston Churchill
• The NHS
• Plaid Cymru
• William Golding
• J.R.R. Tolkien
• Doris Lessing
• Samuel Beckett
• Harold Pinter
• Dylan Thomas
• John Betjeman
• Evelyn Waugh
• George Orwell

Unit 6 – American history and literature

American history

• Native Americans
• Christopher Columbus
• English settlments in the Americas
• Slavery and life in the Americas
• The Great Awakening
• The Treaty of Paris
• The American Revolutionary War
• The Boston Tea Party
• US independence
• The Bill of Rights
• The Louisiana Purchase
• The Seneca Falls Convention
• The American Civil War
• Jim Crow Law
• World War I
• World War II
• Women’s right to vote
• The Prohibition age
• The Great Depression
• The abolitionist cause
• The New Deal
• The Truman Doctrine
• The Korean War
• John F. Kennedy
• Dr Martin Luther King
• Barack Obama

American literature

• The Colonial Period
• The Revolutionary Age
• Transcendentalism
• The Lost Generation
• The Beat Generation
• John Smith
• John Winthrop
• Anne Bradstreet
• Thomas Paine
• Thomas Jefferson
• Alexander Hamilton
• William Hill Brown
• Washington Irving
• James Fenimore Cooper
• Edgar Allan Poe
• Ralph Waldo Emerson
• Henry David Thoreau
• Harriet Beecher Stowe
• Nathaniel Hawthorne
• Herman Melville
• Walt Whitman
• Henry James
• Emily Dickinson
• Robert Frost
• Ernest Hemingway
• F. Scott Fitzgerald
• William Faulkner
• Mark Twain
• Gertrude Stein

8. Can I get a discount?

Good news: if you’re one of our LanguagEd course participants, there’s a 15% discount reserved for you expiring on Sunday 13 March! You will find your discount code in the courses you’ve already bought, as we explained in our newsletter. Please make sure that you correctly apply the coupon code and the 15% discount is deducted from your total before you confirm your payment – if in doubt, just drop us an email at chiara@languaged.org, we’re always happy to help!