Sciences (General Science 6–8; Biology / Chemistry / Physics 9): Comparative Analysis of Punjab (PCTB), Sindh (STBB), and KP (KPTBB) Textbooks

Sources analyzed (paths relative to extracted-text/):

Citation convention: “p.N” is the ===== PAGE N ===== marker in the extracted file — the Nth page of the source PDF, which typically runs 2–5 pages ahead of the printed folio. Three files (PCTB GS7, STBB GS7, STBB Biology 9) are native digital text with no page markers; those are cited by section number or printed folio taken from the book’s own table of contents.

Quotation discipline: every verbatim quotation below is from an English-medium book and has been re-grepped against its source file. general-science-6-ur is Urdu and is never quoted — see §7 for why it could not even be theme-graded reliably.

Noise handling: KP files carry perfect24u.com and awazeinqgilab.com watermarks and inserted advertising pages (KP GS7: 132 watermark lines; KP Biology 9: 97). PCTB scans carry scattered watermark fragments that corrupt table-of-contents lines. OCR mangles equations, formulas and subscripts throughout — this analysis compares chapter architecture and prose, never formulas.

1. The headline finding

There is no single national science curriculum operating across these three boards. The three provinces are running textbooks written to three different curriculum generations, and the divergence is visible in the very first thing a reader sees — the chapter list.

Punjab has re-platformed onto the post-2022 curriculum. Sindh and KP have not. The consequence is that Sindh and KP science books converge on each other far more closely than either converges on Punjab — in three of the six subject-grade slots examined, Sindh’s and KP’s chapter lists are effectively the same list.

2. Class 9 chapter lists — the 9 vs 9 vs 9 comparison

2.1 Biology 9

Punjab: 11 chapters over ~167 printed pages (glossary begins p.176). Sindh: 9 chapters, ch.9 Transport beginning at printed p.174. KP: 9 units, unit 9 beginning at p.187 of 231 scan pages (glossary p.214).

Sindh and KP are the same nine-chapter book in the same order, and both prefaces give the same origin story for that number. Sindh: “Since long Biology was teaching only in IX class, the text book was consits of 19 chapters which was unable to complete in working hours… So this book is consist of 9 chapters” (Biology 9 preface). Sindh’s Physics 9 preface repeats the formula verbatim in its own subject: “So, this book consists of 9 units which have been thoroughly revised and re-written to meet the requirement of the curriculum” (p.4).

Punjab’s divergences from that shared list:

• Adds Biomolecules (ch.6), Reproduction in Plants (ch.10), and Biostatistics (ch.11 — mean/median/mode, bar charts). Biostatistics is a genuinely new strand: “biostatistic” occurs 28 times in Punjab Biology 9 against 2 in KP and 1 in Sindh, and “median” occurs 25 times in Punjab against 0 in both others.
• Drops Nutrition as a standalone chapter and folds transport into a broader “Plant Physiology” chapter, moving the human-circulation material out.
• Reorders: puts Biodiversity second (before the cell), where Sindh and KP put the biological-method chapter second and biodiversity third.

What all three share — evidence of a common NC ancestry that survives the re-platforming: all three open with an Introduction/Science-of-Biology chapter containing (a) branches of biology, (b) careers in biology, (c) a Quranic section, and (d) the biological method illustrated by malaria. Malaria occurs 32× (Punjab), 21× (Sindh), 51× (KP). Punjab titles it “1.8- Malaria -An Example of Biological Method” (p.3, TOC).

2.2 Chemistry 9

Punjab’s list is verbatim from its TOC (p.3). This is the sharpest divergence in the entire corpus.

Sindh’s and KP’s chapter lists are identical — same eight titles, same order. The convergence goes below title level to section headings: Sindh §4.1 and KP §4.1 are both “Why do atoms form chemical Bonds?”; Sindh §6.1 and KP §6.1 are both “Solution, Aqueous Solution, Solute and Solvent”; both §8.1 is “Metals”. (A normalized long-line overlap test found only 8 shared lines between the two files, so the prose is not verbatim-shared — or OCR noise defeats the test. The claim here is architectural identity, not copied text.)

Punjab adds four strands absent from both other boards entirely: Stoichiometry, Energetics, Equilibria, Hydrocarbons (organic chemistry), Environmental Chemistry, plus two explicitly skills-based chapters (Empirical Data Collection and Analysis; Laboratory and Practical Skills). Punjab drops Electrochemistry, which is a full chapter in both Sindh and KP.

2.3 Physics 9

Punjab’s list is verbatim from its TOC (p.3). Sindh’s TOC (p.3) prints only eight rows — it skips Unit 8 in its own contents page, an error in the book; Unit 8 exists and is titled “ENERGY SOURCES AND TRANSFER OF ENERGY”, opening at p.180. KP has eight units, folding Hooke’s law and elasticity into Properties of Matter rather than giving them a separate “Forces and Matter” unit as Sindh does.

Divergences:

• Units 1–4 are identical across all three boards — the mechanics core is genuinely national.
• Punjab uniquely adds Magnetism (ch.8) at grade 9; neither Sindh nor KP has magnetism in the class-9 Physics book.
• Punjab uniquely adds a “Nature of Science” chapter (ch.9) — see §5.1.
• Punjab uniquely drops Gravitation, which is a full unit in both Sindh and KP.
• Sindh alone gives energy sources their own unit, framing energy through fossil/hydro/solar/nuclear/geothermal/wind/biomass/tidal resources and efficiency: its SLOs require students to “Differentiate energy sources as non renewable and renewable energy sources with examples of each” and “Explain why a system cannot have an efficiency of 100%” (p.180). Punjab treats the same material as “Work, Energy and Power”.

3. General Science 6–8 chapter lists

3.1 Class 7 — the cleanest three-way comparison (all English)

Punjab’s list is verbatim from its TOC; Sindh’s from its chapter headers; KP’s is reconstructed from unit-opener pages (SLO blocks at pp.16, 21, 34, 45, 56, 67, 77, 90, 103, 118) because the KP TOC page did not survive OCR.

Sindh and KP GS7 are the same twelve-chapter book, chapter for chapter, in the same order. Punjab shares only four of those twelve chapter titles (Structure of an Atom; Physical and Chemical Changes; and loosely the heat and space chapters), and adds three that appear nowhere in the Sindh/KP list: Immunity and Diseases, Chemical Bonds, Solutions, and Technology in Everyday Life. Punjab drops the Water chapter that both other boards give a full unit to.

3.2 Class 8 — Sindh and KP are the same book

¹ Punjab TOC line is corrupted by watermark; the chapter’s SLOs at p.30 cover variation, adaptation, genes/chromosomes and DNA, and the running text reads “and Cell Divisio[n]”.

Sindh’s list is verbatim from its TOC (p.3). KP’s is reconstructed from chapter openers (pp.3, 22, 30, 41, ~55, 68, 82, 95, 105, 119, 145, 150). The two are the same twelve-chapter list in the same order. Punjab overlaps substantially at this grade — it retains Biotechnology, Chemical Reactions, Acids/Alkalis/Salts, and Force and Pressure — but reorders the front of the book to lead with Ecology, adds a Periodic Table chapter, and again adds Technology in Everyday Life, which is a Punjab-only fixture at grades 6, 7 and 8.

3.3 Class 6

Punjab GS6 (12 chapters, reconstructed from SLO openers at pp.7, 24, 35, 47, 57, 70, 84, 101, 114, 123, 131, 139): Cells and Tissues · Reproduction in Plants · Nutrition and Food · Digestion and Enzymes · Particulate Nature of Matter · Elements, Compounds and the Periodic Table · Mixtures and Solutions · Energy · Electricity · Magnetism · Technology in Everyday Life · Our Solar System.

KP GS6 (12 chapters, reconstructed from figure numbering and SLO openers): Cells · Sense Organs · Leaf Structure and Photosynthesis · Environment and Feeding Relationships · Matter, Atoms and Molecules · Air and its Composition · Solutions · Energy · Simple Machines · Light and Reflection · Sound · Space and Satellites.

The two overlap on cells, matter/atoms, solutions, energy, light and space, but KP alone gives Sense Organs and Simple Machines their own chapters at grade 6, and Punjab alone has the Technology in Everyday Life chapter. Sindh’s class 6 is Urdu-only in this corpus (§7).

4. Depth and pages-per-topic

Punjab covers roughly 1.4× as many topics in a similar or smaller page budget. Punjab Chemistry 9 gives ~13 pages per chapter to thirteen chapters; KP gives ~30 pages per unit to eight. This is the clearest structural trade-off in the corpus: Punjab is broad and thin; KP is narrow and thick; Sindh sits between. Note the KP figures are inflated — KP scans include inserted advertising pages and watermark-only pages (KP Biology 9 has 97 watermark lines; KP GS7 has 132), so the true KP content extent is somewhat lower than the raw page count.

Two of Punjab’s thirteen chemistry chapters (Empirical Data Collection and Analysis; Laboratory and Practical Skills) and one of its nine physics chapters (Nature of Science) are methodology rather than content, so the science-content breadth gap is a little narrower than the raw chapter counts suggest — but the added content strands (stoichiometry, energetics, equilibria, hydrocarbons, environmental chemistry, biomolecules, biostatistics, magnetism) are real.

5. Currency and modern content

5.1 Punjab is the only board with post-2019 content

COVID-19 appears in five Punjab books and in zero Sindh or KP books.

Punjab Biology 9 treats it substantively: “Coronavirus is a virus, identified in late 2019 in Wuhan, China, It caused a pandemic of respiratory illness, called COVID-19” (p.36), and returns to it in the Biostatistics chapter, using COVID-19 case data as the worked example for public-health data analysis (p.168). This is the single cleanest edition-era tell in the corpus, and it dates the Sindh and KP science books to pre-2020 content regardless of their reprint year.

Punjab Physics 9’s “Nature of Science” chapter (ch.9) has no counterpart in either other board. Its SLOs require students to distinguish “Classical Mechanics / Quantum Mechanics / Relativistic Mechanics / Particle Physics / Electromagnetism / Computational Physics / Climate Physics” and to “Explain, with examples in Physics, falsifiability as the idea that a theory is scientific only if it makes assertions that can be disproven” (p.181). Explicit falsifiability instruction — Popperian philosophy of science — appears nowhere else in the corpus. The same chapter is where nanotechnology and AI enter: “nano-technology is a blend of physics, chemistry, material science and engineering… In an other field of ‘artificial intelligence’ the development involves computer science, mathematical logic, neuroscience” (pp.192–193).

5.2 Climate change

Climate is well covered at grade 8 by all three boards. At grade 9 it survives only where a board gave it structural space: Punjab’s Environmental Chemistry chapter (ch.10, pp.129–144) is the densest climate treatment in the corpus, listing mitigation directly — “climate change: planting trees, reduction in livestock farming, decreasing use of…” (p.134). KP Physics 9 reaches it through the thermal-radiation chapter (“GREENHOUSE EFFECT AND GLOBAL WARMING”, p.247). Sindh Chemistry 9 and Sindh Physics 9 mention climate change zero times, and KP Chemistry 9 zero times.

5.3 Biotechnology, IT, space

Biotechnology is a full chapter at grade 8 in all three boards and is well populated (Punjab GS8: 37 mentions; KP GS8: 46; Sindh GS8: 30), with genetic-modification content in each (Punjab 29, KP 24, Sindh 6). It then largely disappears at grade 9 in all three (Punjab Bio 9: 9; Sindh: 3; KP: 3). Nanotechnology is effectively absent everywhere — two mentions in Punjab Physics 9, one in KP Physics 9, zero in the other sixteen books. Space content is strong in all three at every grade (all three have a space chapter at grades 6, 7 and 8).

6. Religious and cultural framing

6.1 Quranic content in Biology 9 is a shared, curriculum-mandated feature — but the boards have diverged on what surrounds it

All three Biology 9 books carry a dedicated Quranic section in Chapter 1, and all three quote the same two verses.

Sindh: “The Almighty Allah has conveyed a great knowledge about the origin and characteristics of animals and plants through our Holy Book, the Quran. A few of Ayah are quoted as under” — then Al-Anbiya 30 (“We made every living thing from water”) and Al-Nur 45 (§1.1.3). Punjab quotes the identical pair, rendering Al-Nur 45 as “Allah hath created every animal from water. Then some of them up over their bellies, others walk on two legs, and others on four” (p.13). KP’s §1.6 quotes a wider set including Al-Sajda 7 and Al-Mominoon 12 (p.15) and adds an exercise question: “Write the translation of any three verses of the Holy Quran related to the…” (p.29).

The interpretive framing differs in one substantive way. Punjab explicitly ties the verses to common descent: it introduces the Al-Nur passage with “Quran also describes the common origin and modification of animals” and glosses Al-Anbiya 30 as hinting “at the common origin of all liv[ing] things in the water” (pp.12–13). Sindh reads the same verse materially — “Here water is symbolized with the protoplasm as the basis of life” (§1.1.3) — without the common-descent reading. This is the only place in the corpus where a board uses scripture to support an evolutionary framing.

Absolute counts (whole-book): “Allah” — KP Bio 12, Punjab Bio 7, Sindh Bio 5; “Quran” — Punjab Bio 7, KP Bio 7, Sindh Bio 4. Chemistry and Physics are near-secular in Punjab and Sindh (Punjab Chem 1 “Allah” — the bismillah on p.1; Sindh Chem/Phys 0), with one large exception below.

6.2 KP Physics 9 opens the book with Quranic verses; Punjab and Sindh do not

KP Physics 9’s Chapter 1 opens with a page of Arabic verses with English rendering — “The sun is not [permitted] to overtake the moon, nor is the night to outpace the [day]”, “0 company of Ji[nn] and men, if you can (and want) to [pass beyond]… you will not cross except by the authority (from Allah)”, “He who created seven heaven[s] in layers. You see no discre[p]ancy in the creation of the [Merciful]” — closing with “Do they not think? Do they not contemplate? Do they (people) not look?” (p.5). This is immediately followed by a boxed “ISLAMIC WORLD CONTRIBUTION TO PHYSICS” section profiling Yaqub Kindi (800–873) and Al Beruni (973–1048), and then “FAMOUS PAKISTANI PHYSICISTS” (pp.5–6). Neither Punjab nor Sindh Physics 9 has any equivalent opening. (OCR of this page is poor; the verse texts are quoted here as they appear in the extraction and the surah references are not legible in the scan.)

6.3 Punjab has dropped Muslim-scientist profiles; Sindh and KP have kept them

This is the clearest framing divergence in the corpus.

Sindh Biology 9 has a section §1.1.4 “Contribution of Muslim Scientists” — “The Muslim scientists have played great role in the development of…” — and examines students on it: “Describe the role of Muslim scientists in the field of biology” (exercise), plus an MCQ on “The Muslim scientists who identified many diseases like…”. KP Biology 9 has the parallel §1.7 “Muslim scientists and their contributions” (p.19). Both chemistry books do the same: Sindh Chemistry 9’s SLOs require students to “Explain the contribution of Muslim scientists in the development of chemistry” (p.5), followed by a table crediting Jabir Ibn-e-Hayan with “Invented experimental methods” (pp.6–7); KP Chemistry 9 devotes pp.6–8 to the “Muslim Period 600 - 1600 AD”, stating that “The period of Muslims is generally called the period of ‘Al - Chemists’ in the history of chemistry” (p.7).

Punjab’s NC-2023 Biology 9 and Chemistry 9 contain none of this. Punjab Biology 9 retains the Quranic section (§1.4) but has no Muslim-scientists section at all; where Sindh and KP run scripture and Islamic history of science and careers, Punjab’s Chapter 1 runs scripture and careers only — “1.3- Careers in Biology” (p.3, TOC), covering biotechnologist, forensic scientist and their degree requirements (p.12). (The two are adjacent in the chapter, but nothing in the books establishes that one was substituted for the other.) Punjab Physics 9’s only named Pakistani scientist reference is secular and modern: “A Pakistani scientist Dr. Abdus Salam along with Sheldon Glashow and…” (p.56). The re-platformed Punjab books thus kept the religious framing and dropped the Islamic-history-of-science framing — the two moved independently.

6.4 Local context is thin almost everywhere, with one strong exception

Word-boundary counts of province references (which excludes the “industrial”/“Indus” false-positive problem):

Most of the KP and Punjab hits are front-matter only — board names, publisher addresses, author affiliations. Checking KP Chemistry 9 for any KP place-name in the body (pp.10–255) returns nothing; the twenty hits are all masthead. Punjab Physics 9’s eight “Punjab” hits are all copyright page and author biography.

Sindh General Science 7 is the genuine outlier — it localizes content, not just its masthead. It illustrates the water chapter with “Figure 4.4 River Indus” and “Figure 4.5 Clifton Beach”; it names Thar as the driest region of Pakistan; it sets a Sindh-specific activity — “Activity 5.3: (a) Identify the sources of clean water in Sindh. (b) Draw a labelled map of Sindh to show these sources”; it explains that “In Sindh, three different water qualities are maintained to serve the…” population; it grounds a biology example in “fungal infections in cattle in Sindh”; and it observes flower structure using “roses which can be observed in Sindh”. Sindh Biology 9 similarly uses provincial epidemiology — “A bar chart showing the trend of malaria cases reported in Sindh 2016-17”.

KP’s only substantive in-content localization found is conservation-themed: “large number of migratory birds passing through Chitral are hunted and killed during…” and a figure captioned “Conservation of migratory birds in Chitral, Khyber Pakht[unk]hwa” (KP Bio 9, pp.62, 65). Punjab’s science books contain essentially no province-specific in-content localization at all — consistent with a board writing to a national curriculum rather than a provincial one.

7. Pedagogy

¹ Low counts reflect phrasing variants (“students should be able to”, “At the end of this unit…”) and OCR damage to SLO headers, not absence — every book in the corpus carries per-chapter SLO blocks.

Findings:

• SLO-per-chapter is universal. All eighteen books open every chapter with an explicit learning-outcomes list. On this dimension the three boards are fully aligned.
• Activity density is highest at grades 6–7 in Punjab and Sindh, and markedly lower in KP. Sindh GS7 (65 activities) and Punjab GS7 (66) roughly triple KP GS7 (20); KP GS6 records only 5. KP compensates slightly with a higher “experiment” count, suggesting a more demonstration-led than inquiry-led design.
• Punjab GS6/GS7/GS8 carry a “Teacher Guide” apparatus absent from the other boards — 32 “Teacher Guide” callouts in GS6 alone, embedding teaching notes on the student page.
• KP leads on web links (KP Physics 9: 26; KP Biology 9: 14) with per-chapter “WEB LINKS” boxes; Punjab Chemistry 9 has the highest raw count (36) but Punjab Biology 9 and Physics 9 have none. Sindh Biology 9 and Chemistry 9 have none.
• STEM careers content is present in all three Biology 9 books — Punjab §1.3 “Careers in Biology”, Sindh §1.1.2 “Careers in biology”, and KP “Careers in Biology” (section number destroyed by OCR; the book’s own index lists it at printed p.5) with a student-facing table (“Students | Feld | Career (may be 1 or more)”, p.13) and a reflective exercise (“Which career would you like to adopt after studying biology and why?”, p.29). KP’s is the most developed (13 career mentions vs Punjab 7, Sindh 3). Careers content is absent from every Chemistry and Physics book except one incidental Punjab mention, and absent from all six General Science books at every grade in all three boards.
• Punjab uniquely institutionalizes methodology as assessed content: Chemistry ch.12 “Empirical Data Collection and Analysis” and ch.13 “Laboratory and Practical Skills”, Physics ch.9 “Nature of Science”, Biology ch.11 “Biostatistics”. Sindh and KP fold data-handling into the Chapter-2 biological-method chapter only (KP §2.5 “Data Organization and Data Analysis”, p.38).

8. Alignment verdict

Not aligned — and the misalignment has a clean two-camp structure.

1. On paper, one national curriculum; in practice, two. Sindh and KP are running mutually near-identical books derived from National Curriculum 2006. KP’s Chemistry 9, Physics 9 and Biology 9 carry 2018 DCTE NOCs and are still being reprinted for academic year 2025-26. Sindh’s are 2019–2020 AFAQ editions written explicitly to the “New Curriculum 2006”. Punjab has moved to SNC 2022 / NC 2023 and rewritten its books accordingly.

2. Sindh–KP convergence is at the architectural level and is remarkable. Chemistry 9 (8 chapters), General Science 7 (12 chapters) and General Science 8 (12 chapters) are the same lists in the same order — down to shared section headings in Chemistry (“Why do atoms form chemical Bonds?” as §4.1 in both). Biology 9 is also identical at nine chapters in the same order. Physics 9 differs only by KP folding Sindh’s “Forces and Matter” into “Properties of Matter” (8 units vs 9). A normalized text-overlap test found the prose is not verbatim-shared, so this is common-curriculum convergence rather than copying — though OCR noise limits that test.

3. Punjab diverges by adding breadth and methodology, and by trimming depth. It adds stoichiometry, energetics, equilibria, hydrocarbons, environmental chemistry, biomolecules, biostatistics and magnetism; drops electrochemistry and gravitation; and appends explicit nature-of-science, data-analysis and lab-skills chapters. The cost is pages per chapter (~13 in Chemistry 9 vs KP’s ~30).

4. Currency splits the same way. COVID-19 appears in five Punjab books and zero Sindh/KP books. Climate change is well covered at grade 8 by all three but vanishes from Sindh Chemistry 9, Sindh Physics 9 and KP Chemistry 9 entirely, while Punjab gives it a whole chapter.

5. Religious framing is the most aligned element in the whole corpus, and is not where the boards differ. All three Biology 9 books carry a Chapter-1 Quranic section quoting the same verses. The genuine divergence is adjacent: Punjab’s re-platformed Biology 9 and Chemistry 9 carry no Muslim-scientist history-of-science sections, which both Sindh and KP retain — while KP alone escalates in the other direction, opening Physics 9 itself with Quranic verses plus an “Islamic World Contribution to Physics” panel.

6. Localization is a Sindh trait, not a general one. Sindh GS7 and Bio 9 genuinely localize (River Indus, Clifton Beach, Thar, Sindh water quality, Sindh malaria data, cattle disease in Sindh). KP localizes once substantively (Chitral migratory birds). Punjab’s provincial mentions are entirely masthead — no province-specific in-content examples were found, consistent with writing to a national rather than provincial curriculum.

9. Caveats

• Three files have no page markers. general-science-7-en, general-science-7-en and biology-9-en are native digital extractions without ===== PAGE N ===== markers; they are cited by section number or printed folio only. Punjab GS7’s and Sindh Biology 9’s chapter lists come from their own printed TOCs and are high-confidence.
• general-science-6-ur could not be theme-graded. It is 168 pages of Urdu with essentially zero Latin-script content; the tesseract-urd output is too degraded to enumerate chapters or topics reliably (a search for the chapter marker باب returns 9 scattered hits that do not resolve into a chapter structure). It is excluded from all comparisons above rather than guessed at. What can be stated: Sindh has no English-medium General Science 6 in this corpus, while Punjab and KP both do.
• KP TOC pages did not survive OCR for GS6, GS7, GS8, Chemistry 9 and Physics 9. Those chapter lists are reconstructed from unit-opener SLO blocks, running heads, section numbering (§N.1) and figure numbering (Fig N.x). Cross-checks agreed in each case, but individual KP chapter titles are lower-confidence than Punjab’s and Sindh’s, which come from printed TOCs. KP Physics 9’s unit numbering in particular is partly inferred: several section numbers OCR’d inconsistently (e.g. the gravitation chapter’s opening section renders as “2.1 LAW OF UNIVERSAL GRAVITATION” at p.131, which is inconsistent with Dynamics sections at pp.63–93 and is read here as a misrecognized “5.1”).
• Sindh Physics 9’s own TOC is defective — it prints eight rows and omits Unit 8. Unit 8 (“ENERGY SOURCES AND TRANSFER OF ENERGY”) was located at p.180 and is included above.
• Keyword counts are indicative, not exact. They are raw line-hit counts over OCR text; OCR splits and mangles words, so counts understate. Counts are used above only for relative comparison between books, never as absolute measures. Where a count drove a conclusion (COVID-19, Muslim scientists, biostatistics, localization), the underlying passages were read directly.
• The verbatim-overlap test is weak evidence. Normalized long-line matching between board pairs returned 0–8 shared lines in every pairing. Given that OCR of the same sentence in two different scans rarely produces identical output, this test can establish architectural similarity from headings but cannot rule out shared prose. The Sindh–KP convergence claims above rest on chapter and section titles, which were read directly.
• Formulas, equations and numerical data were not compared — OCR destroys subscripts, superscripts and mathematical layout throughout the corpus. All conclusions are drawn from chapter architecture and prose.
• Punjab GS8’s chapter-3 title is uncertain. The TOC line is overwritten by a watermark fragment; the title is given as “Variation, Heredity and Cell Division” on the basis of the chapter’s own running text and SLOs (p.30).
• KP page counts are inflated by non-content pages. KP PDFs include inserted advertising pages and watermark-only pages (perfect24u.com, awazeinqgilab.com). Pages-per-chapter figures for KP in §4 should be read as upper bounds.

Balochistan (BTBB) — the most secular science shelf in the corpus

Added 23 Aug 2026. Vintage: General Science 6–8, Biology 9, Chemistry 9 and Physics 9 are National Curriculum 2022-23 pilot editions; Chemistry 10 is National Curriculum 2006.

Four of Balochistan’s seven science volumes contain no religious token at all, across a combined 188,923 words. That is the cleanest result on A1 anywhere in this study, and it is what drives Balochistan’s corpus-lowest religious-saturation mean.

No creationist or anti-evolution framing was found in Biology 9. Its 0.7 per thousand is incidental reference, not worldview framing.

Assessment demand splits the shelf. Physics 9 sets 21 evaluation prompts, all of the form “Justify that distance, speed, time, mass, energy and temperature are scalar quantities” — the justify-that template applied to a demonstrable proposition, which is exactly what it is for. Chemistry 9 sets seven. Against that, General Science 8 sets zero evaluation verbs across 48,820 words: pure recall, and the highest A3 in the board’s science set.

The gender result is the corpus-wide one and it is not softened by the secularity. Chemistry 9 carries two feminine tokens across 64,995 words; Chemistry 10 carries three across 42,030. No woman scientist is named in any Balochistan science volume — its only Curie occurrence, in General Science 6, is Curie temperature, the physical constant. On this axis Balochistan sits with Sindh, against Punjab and KP, both of which do name one.

What this contributes to the track’s argument. Balochistan is a vintage-matched partner for Punjab’s SNC 2022 science books, and the matched comparison holds: on the newest curriculum generation in the country, science is being written without religious framing in both provinces. The absence of a national science curriculum does not, at least here, produce provincial divergence in how secular the science is.