Practice question · Select all that apply
Which habits of thought has this course been building?
Hints
- The habits concern provenance, systems and possibility.
- Trusting a royal monument at face value is the opposite habit.
Show the answer
- A. Ask who made a source and why, rather than whether to believe it
- B. Ask what a technology made possible, not what it forced
- C. Prefer a structural explanation to blaming an individual
Why
Hammurabi’s stele, Ramesses’ wall, and Ashoka’s pillars all become more useful once you stop believing them and start reading them. A monument is evidence of what a ruler needed to be seen to be, which is a better fact than the one it claims.
Practise Synthesis: The Human Journey
The app has 4 more questions on this lesson, and keeps your place in the course. History I is free to start.
More questions on Synthesis: The Human Journey
- Prehistory accounts for roughly 95% of the human story.
- Order the whole human journey, oldest first.
- Farming spread despite making individual lives measurably worse, shorter, sicker, harder. Why does that…
- Sort each claim: a habit of thought the course teaches, or a trap it warns against?
- Why does the long view make the present look contingent?
- Complete the course’s closing argument.
- In what sense is the prehistory/history line "drawn behind" people rather than crossed by them?
- Prehistory covers 99.9% of the human past and is studied almost entirely without texts. What does that…