Quiz created: 090402

Most Ancient China: The Zhōu Dynasty

Instructions: Answer the multiple choice questions, guessing if necessary; then click on the "Process Questions" button at the end of the quiz to see your score in the adjacent message box. The program will not reveal which questions you got wrong, only how many points you have. Go back and change your answers until you get them all right. (The message box will rejoice at that point and the page will change color to show it is tickled pink.)

Points to note: (1) Questions with only one possible answer are one point each. (2) Questions with one or more possible answers (represented by check boxes) give a point for each correct answer, but also subtract a point for each wrong answer! (3) The program will not attempt to score your efforts at all if you have not tried at least half of the questions. (4) This quiz is for your own use only. No record of your progress is kept or reported to anyone.

1. The Zhōu dynasty lasted roughly
100 years  300 years  600 years  900 years  1200 years  No Answer
2. For obscure reasons, King Wŭ, the first king of the Zhōu dynasty, ordered that the heartland of the old Shāng kingdom be governed by
his wife 
his devious cousin 
the son (named Wŭ Gēng) of the tyrannical King Zhòu, last king of the Shāng 
a committee of seven farmers 
No Answer
3. Confronted by a rebellion soon after his ascension to the throne, King Wŭ's son, King Chéng, succeeded because he
fled the capital to escape assassination 
was a cute little kid whom nobody had the heart to massacre 
was believed able to summon dragons to aid in his battles, which terrified the rebels 
had the assistance of the famous Duke Dàn, known thereafter as the Duke of Zhōu 
No Answer
4. Although represented in later times as a unified empire, in fact the Zhōu dynasty was a feudal state, with
the king's relatives or agents ruling great fiefdoms 
capitalists and money lenders in fact controlling all aspects of everyday life 
battling warlords, especially in the first half of the dynasty 
each section of the kingdom assigned to a different one of the king's many concubines 
No Answer
5. Under the "well-field system," which divided agricultural land into squares subdivided into nine compartments (like the Chinese character for "well": 井), each middle segment
was allowed to lie fallow until the "grid" was moved over one space every second year 
was required to be at least twice the size of each of the outer ones 
was communally farmed on behalf of the community 
was communally farmed on behalf of the great lords 
No Answer
6. The most important texts from the Zhōu period are
the Bamboo Chronicles 
books of the Confucian Canon 
three commercial tablets written in a kind of cuneiform that is still not well understood 
Buddhist scriptures brought from India 
three fragments later combined to create the "Three Character Classic," used for the rest of Chinese history as a children's textbook 
No Answer
7. Tradition holds that the reason the Western Zhōu period deteriorated into the considerably weaker and more chaotic Eastern Zhōu period is that King Yōu
spent all his time with a favorite concubine, ignoring affairs of state 
was an idiot 
spent all the tax revenues paying Daoist priests to work on ways to make him immortal 
was only a child and fell into the manipulating hands of unscrupulous advisers who competed with each other in trying to state coups 
No Answer

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This consummately cool, pedagogically compelling, self-correcting,
multiple-choice quiz was produced automatically from
a simple text file of questions using D.K. Jordan's
dubiously original, but publicly accessible
Think Again Quiz Maker
of October 6, 2008.