World War I: How and Why It Happened Quiz

Answer: Socialism

The Alliance System was another reason for World War I. Nationalism often led to competitive and antagonistic rivalries among nations. Colonies supplied the European imperial powers with raw materials and provided markets for manufactured goods, which had to do with Imperialism. By 1880 the strongest nation on the European continent from a military and economic point of view was Germany.

Answer: The assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand

In June 1914, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austrian throne, visited the Bosnian capital, Sarajevo. As the royal entourage drove through the city, a Serbian nationalist, Gavrilo Princip, stepped from the crowd and shot the Archduke and his wife.

Answer: Schlieffen Plan

They used this plan in the hope they would defeat France quickly before Russia had mobilised her forces, by going through Belgium to get to Paris, France. This "short-cut" involved invading a neutral country and brought Britain into the war at once. Germany failed to defeat France, and Russia mobilised faster than the Germans had thought was possible.

Answer: Trench warfare

By the spring of 1915, two parallel systems of deep, rat-infested trenches crossed France from the Belgium coast to the Swiss Alps. The Germans occupied one side and the Allied soldiers the other.

Answer: Sinking of the Lusitania

The Zimmermann Telegram was so incredible that it was regarded with considerable skepticism.

Answer: True

The Germans began singing and lighting candles and then the French and British began to sing along because it was a special moment in time when there was peace during war but it didn't last long.

Answer: The Ottoman (Turkish) Empire

Starting in 1915 the Young Turk junta started the systematic mass slaughter of the Armenian minority. They were rounded up; some were killed at once, but most were forced to go on a long march into the Syrian desert without adequate food or drink. They died of thirst, hunger and disease.

In the period from about 1915-17 about one million Armenians were murdered. The Turkish government still vehemently denies the genocide.

Answer: True

Otto Dix (1891-1969), a German painter, went to war and after he came home he painted gruesome corpses and the like to show people what the war was actually like. During the Third Reich he was classed as a 'degenerate artist' and some of this works were burned.

Answer: Verdun

The Battle of Verdun took place during the year of 1916. 1,000,000 French and Germans were killed, wounded, or missing at the Battle of Verdun. The loss of Verdun would have been devastating for the French. They held it, but at an enormous cost in lives.

Answer: shell shock

Many men went insane mostly because of the dead bodies that they had to live with throughout the war and other images of the war. Shell shock was, it seems, a general term for a range of conditions most of which would now be called post traumatic stress syndrome. Doctors used many methods to treat shell shock. Some patients improved, but others didn't.