Sugar Changed the World, Part 3: Word Choice and Multimedia Answers

Read the passage from Sugar Changed the World.The sugar that piled up on the docks near the plantations was something new in the world: pure sweetness, pure pleasure, so cheap that common people could afford it. Scientists have shown that people all over the world must learn to like salty tastes, sour tastes, mixed tastes. But from the moment we are born, we crave sweetness. Cane sugar was the first product in human history that perfectly satisfied that desire. And the bitter lives of the enslaved Africans produced so much sugar that pure sweetness began to spread around the world.

Read the passage and study the image from Sugar Changed the World.Cutting cane was hard work, but it was nothing like what came next: Piles of freshly cut cane had to be fed into the ever-turning mill wheels, until they were completely crushed. The owners insisted that during the work hours the grinding never stop, no matter what. The mills were most often tended by women who were doing dangerous work while getting almost no rest. That was a very bad combination. An ax was often propped up near the rollers so if a slave closed her eyes for a second while pushing the cane, her arm could be hacked off before she was pulled through the merciless grinders. Guests at sugar plantations often remarked on how many one-armed people they saw.Day after day, week after week, month after month, the cane was cut, hauled to the mill, and fed through the rollers. The mills kept going as long as there was cane to grind—the season varied between four and ten months, depending on the local growing conditions. A visitor who came to Brazil in 1630 described the scene: "People the color of the very night, working briskly and moaning at the same time without a moment of peace or rest, whoever sees all the confused and noisy machinery . . . will say that this indeed is the image of Hell.”In this illustration by William Clark, sugar cane is fed into a mill to be ground.

Read the passage and study the map from Sugar Changed the World.If you walked down Beekman Street in New York in the 1750s, you would come to a general store owned by Gerard Beekman—his family gave the street its name. The products on his shelves showed many of the ways sugar was linking the world. Beekman and merchants like him shipped flour, bread, corn, salted beef, and wood to the Caribbean. They brought back sugar, rum, molasses, limes, cocoa, and ginger. Simple enough; but this trade up and down the Atlantic coast was part of a much larger world system.Textbooks talk about the Triangle Trade: Ships set out from Europe carrying fabrics, clothes, and simple manufactured goods to Africa, where they sold their cargoes and bought people. The enslaved people were shipped across the Atlantic to the islands, where they were sold for sugar. Then the ships brought sugar to North America, to be sold or turned into rum—which the captains brought back to Europe. But that neat triangle—already more of a rectangle—is completely misleading.Beekman's trade, for example, could cut out Europe entirely. British colonists' ships set out directly from New York and New England carrying the food and timber that the islands needed, trading them for sugar, which the merchants brought back up the coast. Then the colonists traded their sugar for English fabrics, clothes, and simple manufactured goods, or they took their rum directly to Africa to buy slaves—to sell to the sugar islands. English, North American, French, and Dutch ships competed to supply the Caribbean plantations and buy their sugar. And even all these boats filling the waters of the Atlantic were but one part of an even larger system of world trade.Africans who sold other Africans as slaves insisted on being paid in fabrics from India. Indeed, historians have discovered that some 35 percent of the cargo typically taken from Europe to Africa originally came from India. What could the Europeans use to buy Indian cloth? The Spanish shipped silver from the mines of Bolivia to Manila in the Philippines, and bought Asian products there. Any silver that English or French pirates could steal from the Spanish was also ideal for buying Asian cloth. So to get the fabrics that would buy the slaves that could be sold for sugar for the English to put into their tea, the Spanish shipped silver to the Philippines, and the French, English, and Dutch sailed east to India. What we call a triangle was really as round as the globe.This map shows how the Triangle Trade has traditionally been depicted.Which statement best explains how the map supports the text?

Read the passage and study the image from Sugar Changed the World.Slaves were given long, sharp machetes, which would be their equipment—but for some also their weapons—until the harvest was done. The cutters worked brutal, seemingly endless shifts during the harvest—for the hungry mills crushed cane from four in the afternoon to ten the next morning, stopping only in the midday heat. Slaves had to make sure there was just enough cane to feed the turning wheels during every one of those eighteen hours. They worked in teams, a man slashing the cane, a woman binding every twelve stalks into a bundle. According to one report from 1689, each pair of workers was expected to cut and bind 4,200 stalks a day. Exactly how much they cut depended on how much their mill could handle—the cutting must never get a day ahead of the grinding, for then the sugar cane would dry up.In this illustration by William Clark, enslaved people cut sugar cane.