Edexcel A-Level Religious Studies sample questions and answers (9RS0)
Guide overview All 9 topics Sample questions Papers and weighting Look inside Questions and answers
31 sample questions and answers
Taken from every topic of Edexcel A-Level Religious Studies, specification 9RS0. The full guide has 1,694.
Paper 1
Philosophy of Religion
187 questions in the guide, across 15 subtopics. More from this topic
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Life After Death
What is transmigration of souls?
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The doctrine that the soul moves between bodies across successive lives, carrying its identity with it.
Paper 2
Religion and Ethics
169 questions in the guide, across 14 subtopics. More from this topic
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Environmental Ethics
Define sustainability and explain why it is an ethical idea and not just an economic one.
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Sustainability is meeting present needs without destroying the capacity of future generations to meet theirs. It is ethical because it asks whether people who do not yet exist can make claims on us, and whether present consumption can be justified against future cost. -
Equality
Name some events that mark progress on racial equality.
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The Montgomery bus boycott of 1955 to 1956, the March on Washington in 1963, the US Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Voting Rights Act of 1965, the British Race Relations Acts of 1965, 1968 and 1976, the end of apartheid and Mandela's election in 1994, and the Macpherson report of 1999 into institutional racism. -
Situation Ethics
Where does situationism sit between legalism and antinomianism?
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Legalism arrives with rules already fixed and applies them; antinomianism arrives with nothing at all and improvises. Fletcher's situationism arrives with the tradition's rules as illuminators, informed guides that can be set aside when love requires, but takes only agape as binding. -
Natural Moral Law
How does Aquinas organise law?
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Eternal law is God's own wisdom ordering all things, known fully only to God. Divine law is the part revealed in scripture. Natural law is the rational creature's participation in eternal law, worked out by reason. Human law is the positive law of states, which is only genuinely law when it derives from natural law. -
War and Peace
What rules govern conduct in war under jus in bello?
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Discrimination, meaning combatants may be targeted and non-combatants may not; and proportionality of means, so no more force than the military objective requires. Prohibitions on rape, torture, attacking the wounded and using certain weapons follow, and are codified in the Geneva Conventions.
Paper 3
New Testament Studies
164 questions in the guide, across 13 subtopics. More from this topic
Paper 4
Buddhism
198 questions in the guide, across 15 subtopics. More from this topic
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The Four Noble Truths and the Eightfold Path
Explain what magga adds to the first three truths.
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Magga is the practical answer: the Noble Eightfold Path of right view, right intention, right speech, right action, right livelihood, right effort, right mindfulness and right concentration. Without it the first three truths would state a problem and a hope with no method between them. -
The Three Marks of Existence and the Five Khandas
What difference do the three marks make to how a Buddhist sees the point of living?
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They rule out one answer and supply another: nothing conditioned can be a final resting place, so a life spent securing possessions, status or even a self is built on a mistake. What a human life is for is reframed as awakening and the ending of craving, with compassion for others caught in the same predicament. -
The Three Refuges: Buddha, Dhamma and Sangha
In what sense is the dhamma a refuge?
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Dhamma covers both the teaching and the truth it describes. Taking refuge in it means relying on that account of reality and on the path it prescribes, and Buddhists commonly say it is the dhamma, not the person of the Buddha, that actually protects, because it is what does the work when practised. -
The Five Precepts
What does the fifth precept forbid, and why is it there when drinking harms nobody else directly?
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It covers intoxicants that lead to heedlessness. The usual reasoning is that it protects the other four, since a clouded mind is far likelier to break them, and that it works directly against the mindfulness the path is trying to build. -
The Life of the Buddha and His World
What teachings does the life story itself illustrate?
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The four sights teach impermanence and dukkha; the failed asceticism teaches the middle way; the awakening teaches that liberation comes by insight and is available to a human being; the decision to teach illustrates compassion; and the death illustrates that even a buddha's body is impermanent.
Paper 4
Christianity
194 questions in the guide, across 15 subtopics. More from this topic
Paper 4
Hinduism
210 questions in the guide, across 16 subtopics. More from this topic
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Debates about Scriptural Authority
What did Dayananda Saraswati argue about scriptural authority?
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That only the Vedas are authoritative and later texts and practices that depart from them should be discarded. -
Debates about Scriptural Authority
What is the significance of the Vedas being described as apaurusheya?
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They are held not to be of human authorship, which places them beyond correction by human reason. -
Debates about Yoga
Why is there disagreement about whether the four yogas are alternatives or stages?
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Some read them as separate paths suited to different temperaments, others as a sequence in which devotion and action prepare for knowledge. -
Debates about Yoga
How do defenders answer the charge that modern yoga is inauthentic?
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That the tradition has always adapted, and that physical practice can still lead a person towards the disciplines it came from. -
Feminist and Liberationist Approaches
What resource within the tradition do feminist thinkers appeal to?
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The goddess traditions and the centrality of shakti as feminine divine power.
Paper 4
Islam
195 questions in the guide, across 15 subtopics. More from this topic
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The Six Beliefs of Islam
What are the six articles of faith that Sunni Muslims traditionally list?
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Belief that Allah is one; belief in angels; belief in the revealed scriptures; belief in the prophets; belief in the Day of Judgement; and belief in divine decree, qadr. Sunni tradition calls them the pillars of faith, arkan al-iman, and summarises them in a set creedal formula that many Muslims learn by heart. -
The Life of the Prophet Muhammad
Which features of Arabian society did Muhammad set himself against?
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The worship of idols; the burying of unwanted infant daughters; exploitative lending; the vendetta; and the assumption that obligation stops at the edge of one's own kin. In place of the tribe he put the community of believers, and in place of birth he put piety as the measure of a person's worth. -
Hadith and Sunnah
Which collections do Sunni Muslims rely on?
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Six books hold canonical standing. The compilations of al-Bukhari and Muslim are treated as the most rigorously sifted, followed by those of Abu Dawud, al-Tirmidhi, al-Nasa'i and Ibn Majah. Earlier works, notably Malik's Muwatta, remain in scholarly use, and legal schools also draw on their own founders' collections. -
The Qur'an and Shari'ah
In what sense is the Qur'an the foundation of everything else in Islam?
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Every other authority is derivative. The Sunnah explains it, scholarly consensus and analogy extend it, and no ruling may stand against it. Muslim theology, law, ethics, art and public argument all cite it as the final court. Where Muslims disagree, they disagree about what it means, not about whether it settles the question. -
The Ummah
What does ummah mean?
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The community of those who believe, bound to one another by faith rather than by blood, territory or language. Muslims treat it first as a religious reality carrying obligations of mutual care and shared identity, and only second as a political aspiration.
Paper 4
Judaism
185 questions in the guide, across 14 subtopics. More from this topic
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Ethical Monotheism
What follows practically from the belief that God alone may be worshipped?
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Worship directed anywhere else, whether to images, to other gods or to a human being, counts as idolatry, which Jewish teaching treats as the gravest category of wrongdoing. It also shapes prayer: Jews address God directly, without going through any intermediary figure. -
Ethical Monotheism
Why does Yom Kippur not automatically wipe out a wrong done to another person?
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On the traditional reckoning the Day of Atonement covers offences against God, whereas harm done to a neighbour requires going to that person, putting the damage right and asking their forgiveness first. It is the sharpest practical expression of the two categories of duty. -
Revelation in the Torah and the Talmud
How far into ordinary life does revealed law reach?
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On the traditional understanding, all the way. Halakhah drawn from revelation governs food, dress, business dealings, sexual conduct, speech, and the rhythm of the week and the year. No area of life is marked off as religiously neutral, which is why revelation shapes a whole community and not only its worship. -
Revelation in the Torah and the Talmud
Explain the place of the Ten Commandments in Jewish teaching.
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They carry great symbolic weight as the terms declared publicly at Sinai, but the tradition resists treating them as a summary that outranks everything else. The rabbis actually removed their daily recitation from the liturgy so that no one would conclude that only these ten, out of the whole body of commandments, were binding. -
The Soul, Life After Death and the Purpose of Life
Does Judaism treat a person as a soul trapped in a body?
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Generally not. Jewish thought tends towards seeing the person as a unity of body and soul, both God-given and both good, rather than a spirit imprisoned in matter. That is why the body is treated with great respect after death, washed and buried promptly, and why traditional Judaism has resisted cremation.
Paper 4
Sikhism
192 questions in the guide, across 15 subtopics. More from this topic
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Waheguru, the Self and Liberation
What do Sikhs mean by hukam?
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Hukam is the divine order or command by which everything comes to be and is sustained. Sikhs teach that nothing falls outside it, including suffering, and that spiritual maturity shows itself in living in tune with hukam rather than resisting it. -
Sikh Thought and its Indic Background
What do K E Nayar and J S Sandhu argue about Guru Nanak's dealings with the Nath yogis?
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They read his recorded discourse with the yogis as a serious engagement in which he adopted their vocabulary and their spiritual seriousness while rejecting their withdrawal from society. Their name for the resulting figure is the socially involved renunciate: inwardly detached, outwardly active in work, family and community. -
Sangat, Panth and Qaum
Explain what is being claimed when the Panth is described as a qaum.
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Qaum means a people or a nation. To call the Panth a qaum claims that Sikhs are not only a religious body but a distinct community with collective political interests, a claim with obvious consequences in the twentieth century and one that other Sikhs think overstates what is essentially a spiritual fellowship. -
Sikh Moral Principles, Seva and Miri-Piri
What is a manmukh?
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Someone whose life faces toward their own mind and ego rather than toward the Guru. Sikhs describe the manmukh as governed by haumai, restless, driven by lust, anger, greed, attachment and pride, and therefore still bound to rebirth. -
The Guru Granth Sahib and Secondary Texts
Explain the standing of Bhai Gurdas's poetry within the tradition.
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Bhai Gurdas wrote out the first compilation of the scripture and also composed poetry expounding Sikh doctrine and recording the early community. His work is not scripture, but it may be sung in the gurdwara, and Sikhs traditionally treat it as the earliest authoritative commentary on the Gurus' teaching.
Edexcel A-Level Religious Studies Active Recall Guide
The other 1,663 questions, with the answers printed after each section.