Quick questions on Herodotus and Thucydides for HSC History Extension

2short Q&A pairs drawn directly from our worked dot-point answer. For full context and worked exam questions, read the parent dot-point page.

What is use the speeches as your pivot evidence?

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Thucydides's admission that he reconstructed speeches "as fitting to the occasion" is the single best piece of evidence for complicating any simple objective-versus-unreliable framing; deploy it whenever the question invites you to rank the two historians.

What is match the command word?

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"Analyse" wants the mechanism (how each choice about scope and evidence produces a trade-off); "explain" wants you to show HOW context (Thucydides's exile, Herodotus's world of expanding Greek contact) shaped method; "evaluate"/"assess" wants a judgement about which tension matters more, with the concession that both models remain defensible.

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