Physics

Three scored books, one per board, class 9, all English-medium — and the subject where the national curriculum is most visible and the board difference most stark. Units 1 to 4 are identical across all three boards: Physical Quantities and Measurement, Kinematics, Dynamics, Turning Effect of Forces. That mechanics core is genuinely national. After it the boards part. Punjab uniquely adds Magnetism at grade 9, which neither other board teaches, and uniquely drops Gravitation, a full unit in both Sindh and KP. Sindh alone gives Energy Sources and Transfer of Energy its own unit, framing energy through renewable and non-renewable resources and efficiency. KP has eight units rather than nine, folding Hooke's law and elasticity into Properties of Matter.

Punjab's ninth chapter, "Nature of Science", has no counterpart anywhere. Its learning outcomes require pupils to distinguish classical, quantum and relativistic mechanics 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". Explicit Popperian instruction appears nowhere else in the corpus, and the same chapter is where nanotechnology and artificial intelligence enter. Its only named Pakistani scientist is Abdus Salam, in a secular frame.

Against that sits the corpus's sharpest religious divergence within the sciences, and it is properly vintage-controlled because Sindh and KP run the same curriculum generation. KP's chapter 1 carries a "QURAAN AND PHYSICS" heading and a full page of Quranic verses before any physics content appears, followed immediately by a boxed "Islamic World Contribution to Physics" section profiling Yaqub Kindi and Al-Beruni, and then famous Pakistani physicists. It is the only physics book in the corpus containing Quranic verses, and it scores A1 3. Sindh's is the most secular book in the entire corpus on the strongest evidence available: not one religious token in 223 pages, and no bismillah — A1 1. Punjab is also 1, a translated bismillah on page 1 and nothing else, chapter 1 opening on measurement. Where the two 2006-curriculum boards diverge, KP is higher every time.

Climate survives at grade 9 only where a board gave it structural space: KP reaches it through the thermal-radiation chapter, under a "Greenhouse Effect and Global Warming" heading; Sindh Physics 9 mentions climate change zero times.

Gender delivers the corpus's most counter-intuitive science result. KP Physics 9 is the most gender-balanced science book in the corpus, and unusually the number is real rather than an artefact: its worked problems routinely use female actors — a driver who brakes when she sees a red light, a girl whose mass is given as 60 kg, a woman applying force. That is a deliberate authoring habit, it costs nothing, and no other board shows it, which is why KP scores 4 here rather than the 5 it earns in every other science volume. Punjab and Sindh are both 5 by absence, Sindh with one female-marked token in 44,833 words.

Coverage is thin and should be reported as thin: only A1 and A7 were assigned to these three books; the social lenses examined nothing else in them, and the scored set covers class 9 only. Class-10 Physics from Punjab and KP has since been added and is unscored — Punjab's under its new 2026 PECTAA syllabus, which puts that board a full generation ahead of its own class-9 book and two ahead of Sindh and KP. One practical warning belongs with any use of the Sindh volume: its own contents page prints eight rows and omits Unit 8, which exists and opens at page 180, so anyone reconstructing the syllabus from the printed table of contents will drop a unit. Confidence is high, with two cautions: KP's unit numbering is partly inferred from inconsistently rendered section numbers, and the OCR of its verse page is poor enough that the surah references are not legible.