Physics, class 10

Four boards, and the cell contains the largest book in the entire corpus: the Federal Board's physics runs 364 pages and 117,833 words, roughly twice Punjab's 204 pages. Its twelve chapters run from heat capacity and thermal expansion through waves, sound, optics and electricity to nuclear physics. Punjab covers the same ground in a different order and adds a final chapter on space and environment; Sindh alone teaches a unit on information and communication technology and splits the atom into separate atomic-structure and nuclear-structure units. Punjab's contents page ends with something none of the others carry — a pairing scheme and model paper, which places the examination inside the textbook rather than outside it. On religion all four agree completely: every board scores 1, and the Federal Board's 117,833 words contain not one religious token, as do KP's 70,090. This is the pattern the study finds across matriculation science generally and it holds here without exception. Gender is the axis that separates them, and the separation is the opposite of what the rest of this study would predict. Punjab and Sindh both score 5, the floor. KP scores 3 — the best result in the cell — because its book is the only one in the corpus that names two women scientists and prints a portrait of one: Marie Curie with her dates, and Lise Meitner credited with the theoretical explanation of nuclear fission. KP is simultaneously the most religiously saturated board in the study overall. Whatever explains the presence of women in a physics textbook, it is not a board's general secularity.