📚 How to solve these questions: 12 tips for all 6 Interactive Reading question types, with a worked example for each.
Ask most people to picture life two hundred years ago and they will describe hardship, which is fair enough, but the picture is usually missing the ordinary parts. Historians who study 1 life spend far less time on famines and wars than on questions such as who fetched the water, what a family ate on a normal Tuesday, and how long a shirt was expected to last. These questions are difficult precisely because nobody recorded the answers 2. A household that never wrote down what it ate leaves no 3. What survives instead is indirect evidence: bills, inventories taken after a death, complaints to a local court about a neighbor's pig. Each item is trivial on its own, and together they describe a way of living that no single document sets out. The results often overturn confident assumptions. Clothing, for example, was so expensive relative to income that garments were repaired for decades and passed between households, which is why a torn coat appears in wills as a real bequest. Food was more varied than expected in good years and 4 in bad ones, and the difference between the two was far sharper than anything most modern households experience. What this work has done is shift the questions historians ask. Instead of asking what happened in a given year, they increasingly ask what was normal, and normal turns out to be much harder to reconstruct than the 5 events that made it into the record in the first place.