Questions 1–5.

Questions 6–10. Select the TWO correct answer choices.

Questions 11–15 are based on the passage below.

For much of the twentieth century, archaeologists studying the Indus Valley Civilization faced an unusual obstacle: unlike its contemporaries in Mesopotamia and Egypt, the Indus script has never been deciphered. Thousands of short inscriptions survive, mostly on small stone seals, but none exceeds roughly twenty-six symbols in length, and no bilingual text analogous to the Rosetta Stone has ever surfaced to provide a key. Some researchers have proposed that the symbols do not encode a spoken language at all, but rather served as religious or political emblems, similar to a coat of arms. This view remains a minority position, however, since statistical analysis of symbol sequences shows patterns consistent with linguistic structure, including sign repetition and positional regularities that would be unusual in a purely symbolic system. Without a longer text or a bilingual key, though, competing decipherment claims — several of which assert links to Dravidian, Indo-Aryan, or even Sumerian languages — remain impossible to verify conclusively, and the debate continues to divide specialists.

Questions 16–20 are based on the passage below.

The traditional narrative of the Bronze Age Collapse — the near-simultaneous fall of several eastern Mediterranean civilizations around 1200 BCE — long centered on a single dramatic cause: waves of seaborne raiders known from Egyptian records as the "Sea Peoples." This explanation, while vivid, has increasingly given way to a more complex, multi-causal model among historians. Climate reconstructions using tree-ring and pollen data now indicate a prolonged drought across the region in the decades preceding the collapse, one severe enough to disrupt grain harvests that palace economies depended on. Because these Bronze Age states were highly interconnected, reliant on long-distance trade for essential materials such as tin (necessary for bronze production), a disruption in one node of the network could cascade through the entire system. Some historians now argue that the Sea Peoples were less a cause of the collapse than a symptom of it: displaced populations set in motion by the very economic and environmental pressures that were already unraveling the old order. This reframing does not deny that invasions occurred, but it resists treating any single factor as sufficient explanation for a collapse that unfolded across an entire interconnected system.