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

Read the passage from Sugar Changed the World.A stream of pale ash-colored syrup gushed out from the mills, bubbling white with foam. The liquid rushed down a wooden gutter directly into the boiling house, a building of massive furnaces and cauldrons, where the syrup was heated and strained and turned into crystals. A giant copper kettle—often about four feet across and three feet deep—waited for the pale river. This was the first in a series of ever-smaller cauldrons, and beneath each gaped what the Brazilians called the "great open mouths"—the huge furnaces that had to be constantly filled with the wood that workers had chopped down and hauled to be ready for this moment. The boiling house was as perilous as the mills, for if a person nodded off for a second, he or she could slip into a bubbling vat.Mammoth fires burned in the "mouths," clouds of steam billowed above the kettles, and the heat was so intense that the boiling houses had to be sprayed with water so they would not go up in flames. Then there was the smell, or rather, the stench of the boiling liquid. As the [sugar cane] juice boiled, a foul scum rose to the top—which a slave had to keep skimming off with a long-handled ladle. Over and over again the liquid had to be strained and purified, even as it kept boiling, boiling, boiling in the copper vats.

Which details do the authors include to support the claim in this passage? Select two options.

Read the passage from Sugar Changed the World.Since sugar had to pass through many hands before it reached the fairs, it was expensive and hard to get. King Henry III of England, for example, liked sugar. Yet there was little he could do to satisfy his craving. He wrote to one official in 1226 asking if he could possibly obtain three pounds of the precious substance—at a cost of about 450 modern dollars. He later appealed to a mayor, hoping he might be able to get four more pounds of the rare grains. And finally, by 1243, he managed to buy three hundred pounds.The fairs lasted until the 1300s, when Venice came to dominate European trade with the Muslim world. The Venetians greatly expanded the sugar trade, so much so that a hundred years after Henry III's reign, the English were able to buy thousands of pounds of the sweet stuff each year.

Read the passage from Sugar Changed the World.Some of the enslaved took the next step. Running away from the sugar plantations, or attacking them in force, was another kind of statement. When the enslaved Africans could not stand their lives anymore, they risked everything to run or to fight. There was just one way for the owners to silence their workers: by making the price of flight or rebellion too high. Spreading terror was the job of the overseer.

On what basis should a reader evaluate evidence for effectiveness? Select three options.

Read the passage and study the image from Sugar Changed the World.Caption: Based on drawings from around 7000 BCE, this image depicts rock climbers finding honey in cliffs. This is the earliest known form of honey collecting. (Eva Crane, World History of Beekeeping and Honey Hunting). . . .A rock drawing in Spain from about 7000 B.C. shows a man who has climbed a hillside, found a crevice holding a hive, and is reaching in to grab the honey. Indeed, a lucky wanderer in just about any part of Europe, Africa, or Asia that wasn’t covered with ice could stumble on a hive and—at the risk of some stings—come away with a treat. (People in the Americas had no bees, so used syrups made from maple trees, agave cactus, or mashed fruits for their sweeteners.) Then someone figured out that you didn't have to be lucky. You could hollow out a log near bees, and they would make it their home. You could "keep" bees—you didn't have to find them.

What evidence from the passage best supports the inference that making sugar was difficult? Select two options.

Read the passage and study the image from Sugar Changed the World.The owner of a sugar plantation built a home—called the Great House—usually high on a hill, where the tropical breezes blow. The open windows provided a kind of air conditioning, making even the hottest days more pleasant. These grand homes, with their high, cool rooms, their polished mahogany furniture, and their servants flitting between the main house and the separate cooking building, were meant to command attention, to show power and wealth. A plantation owner was a kind of god or king, ruling over his empire of sugar.In the Great House the owners could sit on the verandahs, rest their legs on special chairs made for pulling off high rubber boots, drink their rum swizzlers, while their slaves labored on hundreds and hundreds of acres of cane fields. The furniture was imported from abroad, along with all the other comforts—silverware, silk-covered chairs, white christening gowns, porcelain washing bowls.To this day, you can find the Great Houses of old plantations on hilltops throughout the Caribbean, and yet the strange thing is that the men who built and owned the homes hardly used them. For as soon as a sugar planter made enough money, he took his family and moved back to Europe. You can find the planters in the great English novels of the 1800s, such as Jane Austen's Mansfield Park, settled into their English homes and watching, through their account books, how the sugar crop was doing back in the Caribbean. While the masters enjoyed the life of wealth in Europe, the daily routine of the plantations was left in the hands of the overseers. Most often poor men who came to the New World to make their fortunes, the overseers had not the slightest sympathy for their enslaved workers.This is a picture of a Great House in Jamaica.

Read the passage from Sugar Changed the World.Sugar is a taste we all want, a taste we all crave. People throughout the planet everywhere have been willing to do anything, anything at all, to get that touch of sweetness. We even know exactly how thrilling it was to taste sugar for the first time. When the Lewis and Clark Expedition met up with the Shoshone, who had little previous contact with Old World products, Sacagawea gave a tiny piece of sugar to a chief. He loved it, saying it was "the best thing he had ever tasted." Sugar created a hunger, a need, which swept from one corner of the world to another, bringing the most terrible misery and destruction, but then, too, the most inspiring ideas of liberty.

Read the passage from Sugar Changed the World.In the 1400s, Spain and Portugal were competing to explore down the coast of Africa and find a sea route to Asia. That way, they could have the prized Asian spices they wanted without having to pay high prices to Venetian and Muslim middlemen. Spanish and Portuguese sailors searching for that sea route conquered the Canary Islands and the Azores. Soon they began building Muslim-style sugar plantations on the islands, some of them staffed by slaves purchased from nearby Africa. One sailor came to know these islands particularly well because he traded in "white gold"—sugar. And then, as he set off on his second voyage across the sea to what he thought was Asia, he carried sugar cane plants from Gomera, one of the Canary Islands, with him on his ship.His name was Christopher Columbus.

Read the passage from Sugar Changed the World.No one interviewed the Africans who labored in the sugar fields to ask them about their hard labor. They were meant to work and die. But there is one way we can hear them. The Africans invented music, dances, and songs that carry on the pulse, the beat, of their lives. (To hear examples of music from the sugar lands, go to www.sugarchangedtheworld.com.) In Puerto Rico, bomba is a form of music and dance that the sugar workers invented. It is a kind of conversation in rhythm involving a woman, the man dancing with her, and the drummers who watch her and find the right rhythm for her movements. A master coming by would see dancing—no words of anger or rebellion. But as she moved and swayed, as the drummers "spoke" back in their beats, the workers were saying that they were not just labor, not just bodies born to work and die. Instead, they were alive and speaking to one another in movements and sounds that were all their own.In Cuba, sugar workers told their stories in the words and sounds of rumba. As one song said, "The boss does not want me to play the drum.” Overseers feared the slaves were using drums to send messages and spread thoughts of rebellion.Similarly, in Brazil there is a dance called Maculelê, which some trace to the sugar fields. Maculelê is danced with sticks or sugar cane stalks, and it looks very much like training for combat. On many of the sugar islands, Africans created similar dances in which people spin, jump, and seem to menace each other, then, just on the beat, click sticks and twirl away. The dances were a way of imitating warfare without actually defying the master.

Read the passage from Sugar Changed the World.In the 1930s, reporters spread out across the American South to capture the voices of history. Some African Americans who had been born as slaves were still alive, and could describe how they had lived sixty years earlier. Through their words we can finally begin to hear about sugar slavery from those who lived it.Ellen Betts, who grew up as a slave on a sugar plantation in Louisiana, recalled that they worked "hour in, hour out, the sugar cane fields sure stretch from one end of the earth to the other." Ceceil George remembered that she "come up in hard times—slavery times." "Every body worked, young, an ole’, if yo’ could carry two or three sugar cane yo’ worked. Sunday, Monday, it all de same . . . it like a heathen part o’ de country." She meant that in other states slaves got Sunday off to worship God. Not in Louisiana: There, sugar was god, and work was the only religion.

Read the passage from Sugar Changed the World.Slave labor was valuable because it produced cheap sugar that everyone wanted to buy. But if people stopped buying that sugar, the whole slave system would collapse. In the years leading up to the American Revolution, the women of New England refused to buy English products and English tea. The loss of income made London rescind some of the taxes it had imposed on America. Now this same tactic—boycotting—was used to fight slavery. Some 400,000 English people stopped buying the sugar that slaves grew and harvested. Instead, they bought loaves of sugar that carried a label that said, "Produced by the labor of FREEMEN"—the sugar came from India.When the English looked at the sugar they used every day, Clarkson and the other abolitionists made them see the blood of the slaves who had created it. The very fact that slave-made sugar was so popular made it harder for the English to ignore the reality of slavery. Sugar was a bridge—like the sneakers and T-shirts and rugs that, today, we know are made by sweatshop labor. If you wanted the product, abolitionists forced you to think about how it was made. Slavery—a practice as ancient as human civilization—was becoming unacceptable, a form of inhumanity people could no longer tolerate.

Read the passage from Sugar Changed the World.The end of slavery was a great step for human rights. But what did it mean on the sugar plantations—which had depended on extremely cheap labor to keep up with the twenty-four-hour cycle from harvest to mill? In 1836, the same John Gladstone whose sugar estate had exhibited the chained body of the slave leader Quamina wrote to a shipping company. Gladstone asked it to provide a hundred workers (the slang name was "coolies") from India to labor on his plantations. Gladstone's first ships, the Whitby, carrying 249 passengers, and the Hesperus, carrying 244, sailed for Demerara in 1838.

Read the passage from Sugar Changed the World.The seeds for this system were sown in 1823 in the sugar colony of British Guiana—now Guyana—where John Gladstone, father of the future British prime minister William Gladstone, owned over a thousand slaves. John Smith, a young and idealistic English preacher who had recently come to the area, was becoming popular with those slaves. His inspiring sermons retold the story of Moses leading the Jews out of Egypt and to freedom. The sugar workers listened and understood: Smith was speaking not about the Bible, but about the present. That summer, after hearing one of Smith’s sermons, over three thousand slaves grabbed their machetes, their long poles, and rose up against their masters. The governor of the colony rushed toward the burning plantations, where he met a group of armed slaves, and asked them what they wanted."Our rights," came the reply. Here was Haiti—and for that matter America and France—all over again. The slaves insisted they were not property; like the Jews in Egypt, they were God's children, who were owed their basic human rights.