About This Section
This section collects previous-year Board examination questions (CBSE and State Boards) from Chapter 4, with model answers, to show the pattern and depth expected in the exam.
Board PYQ — Very Short Answer (1 mark)
Q1. Which industry was the first symbol of the new industrial era in Britain? Ans. The cotton industry.
Q2. Who improved and patented the steam engine in 1781? Ans. James Watt.
Q3. Which device made it possible for weavers to weave wide pieces of cloth? Ans. The fly shuttle.
Board PYQ — Short Answer (3 marks)
Q4. 'Women workers in Britain attacked the Spinning Jenny.' Explain. Ans. The Spinning Jenny allowed one worker to spin many threads at once, reducing the demand for hand spinners. Women who survived on hand spinning feared unemployment, so they attacked the new machines; this conflict continued for a long time.
Q5. Why was there a slow pace of technological change in nineteenth-century Britain? Ans. New technology was expensive; machines often broke down and were costly to repair, and they were not as effective as claimed. So industrialists were cautious — for example, there were only 321 steam engines in all England at the start of the century.
Board PYQ — Short Answer (3 marks)
Q6. Explain any three problems faced by Indian cotton weavers in the nineteenth century. Ans. (1) Their export market collapsed as Britain imposed duties; (2) their local market was glutted with cheap Manchester cloth they could not compete with; and (3) during the American Civil War, raw cotton prices rose, starving them of supplies. Later, Indian factories also flooded the market with machine goods.
Q7. How did the First World War prove a boon for Indian industries? Ans. With British mills busy with the war, Manchester imports fell, giving Indian mills the home market. Indian factories supplied war needs (uniforms, tents, jute bags, boots), ran multiple shifts, hired more workers, and industrial production boomed.
Board PYQ — Long Answer (5 marks)
Q8. Describe the life and working conditions of workers in Victorian Britain. Ans. With an abundance of labour, jobs were scarce and depended on networks of kin and friendship; the jobless slept under bridges or in Night Refuges and Casual Wards. Work was seasonal, so there were long spells of unemployment; during the Napoleonic War the real value of wages fell; and in slumps like the 1830s, unemployment reached 35–75 per cent. Fearing unemployment, workers were often hostile to machines like the Spinning Jenny.
Q9. Explain the peculiarities of industrial growth in colonial India. Ans. European Managing Agencies focused on export products (tea, coffee, mining, indigo, jute). Indian mills at first produced coarse yarn to avoid competing with Manchester, exporting it to China and supplying handlooms. Swadeshi and, above all, the First World War boosted Indian cloth production, while small-scale and handloom production continued to predominate and even expanded — showing that industrialisation in India was uneven and shaped by colonial rule.