Unit test 2
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. The text structure of this passage is
cause and effect.
Which text evidence best supports the authors' claim that sugar processing was a long and difficult process?
"Over and over again the liquid had to be strained and purified."
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. Which evidence best supports the authors' claim and purpose?
"Simple enough; but this trade up and down the Atlantic coast was part of a much larger world system."
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. Which text evidence best supports the authors' claim and purpose that enslaved people were more than mercilessly treated workers?
"They were not just labor, not just bodies born to work and die."
On a plantation there were large groups of workers—between fifty and several hundred. The mill was right next to the crop, so that growing and grinding took place in the same spot. And all the work was governed by extremely tight, rigid discipline. The Muslims began to put together the rules for this new kind of farming. Both they and the Christians experimented with using their slaves to run the plantations. At first many of the slaves working sugar plantations in the Mediterranean were Russians, or anyone captured in war. But even all this careful organization did not solve the second problem with sugar. What evidence from the passage best supports the inference that making sugar was difficult? Select two options.
"the work was governed by extremely tight, rigid discipline" "careful organization did not solve the second problem with sugar"
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. Which inference does this passage support?
As sugar became increasingly available to the English, they wanted to acquire even more of it.
Knowing that their slaves were likely to die by the time they reached their thirties, Louisiana sugar planters were extremely selective—they bought only healthy-looking young men in their late teens. On average, the men purchased in Louisiana were an inch taller than the people bought in the other slave states. Those teenagers made up seven to eight out of every ten slaves brought to America's sugar Hell. The others were younger teenage girls, around fifteen to sixteen years old. Their job, for the rest of their short lives, was to have children. Elizabeth Ross Hite knew that, for sure, "all de master wanted was fo' dem wimmen to hav children." Enslaved children would be put to work or sold. The overseer S.B. Raby explained, "Rachel had a 'fine boy' last Sunday. Our crop of negroes will I think make up any deficiencies there may be in the cane crop." That is, a master could sell any slaves who managed to live, if he needed more money than he could make from sugar. Jazz was born in Louisiana. Could it be that a population of teenagers, almost all of them male, were inspired to develop their own music as a way to speak, to compete, to announce who they were to the world? Bomba in Puerto Rico, Maculelê in Brazil, jazz in Louisiana—all gave people a chance to be alive, to be human, to have ideas, and dreams, and passions when their owners claimed they were just cogs in machinery built to produce sugar. The sugar workers in Hawaii were not enslaved—they chose to come. But they still lived hard lives: Hawai'i, Hawai'i I came seeing the dream But my tears now flow In the canefields When the Africans were brought to work in sugar, they had to form new families, learn new languages—they had to find ways to blend their new lives with what they recalled from their homelands. The holehole bushi hint at one way sugar workers have always found strength and comfort: My husband cuts the cane I carry the stalks from the field Together, the two of us We get by Which statement best explains how the authors develop their claim across the two passages?
Both passages use facts and details to support the claim that sugar workers in different places used music to express themselves and relieve the pressures of brutal work.
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. Which sentence best states the authors' claim in this passage?
Boycotting was an effective and persuasive tool in the fight against slavery.
Then Gandhi invited each person in the theater to join him in an exceptional oath, a pledge not to register, not to accept the government's rules, even if that resulted in severe punishment. Gandhi insisted that every person weigh the commitment and make a personal choice. "Every individual," he explained, must make the oath him- or herself, facing not to his neighbor, but his God. Nor should it be taken in order to gain power over anybody but oneself, for the power of an oath is defined by what one man can promise to do, and what he is willing to suffer: insult, incarceration, hard labor, flogging, fine, deportation, and even death. Everyone in the audience raised his or her hand. Gandhi bound the crowd together to follow a new path, which he called Satyagraha—which means "truth with force," or "firmness." It is also called "love-force." While the goal of violence is to defeat and vanquish the enemy, the goal of Satyagraha is to convince or convert the opponent. "He must be weaned from error by patience and sympathy." A person who believes in Satyagraha will not fight physically, but instead resists through his or her own inner courage, knowing he might be jailed or beaten. Which statement best describes the authors' purpose in this passage?
The authors want to persuade readers that Gandhi had a strong influence on the Indian workers.
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. How do the details in the passage most support the central idea?
The details describe how Spanish and Portuguese explorations helped expand the sugar trade.
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. How does the illustration relate to the description of a Great House in the text?
The illustration shows what a Great House looked like from the outside, while the text explains what a Great House looked like from the inside.
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. How do the historical details in this passage support the authors' claim?
The text includes parts of primary-source interviews with enslaved people to illustrate the difficulty of life on a sugar plantation in Louisiana.
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. The evidence of enslaved people's revolt and fight for freedom is
anecdotal, because it tells a narrative about enslaved people taking action for basic human rights.
The enslaved people on Saint Domingue were not merely fighting against the terrible conditions on the island. They were fighting for principles that they had learned from Europeans and Americans—from people similar to their own slave masters. The trio of great principles behind the French Revolution that began in 1789 consisted of "liberty, equality, fraternity" (brotherhood). As boats arrived in Saint Domingue from France, slaves learned that a revolution was going on in the name of human rights. Already, they'd been given a taste of great change because of a revolution closer to home. In 1779, a regiment of free blacks from Saint Domingue went to America to join in the fight for independence. They brought home with them the idea that "all men are created equal." Two years after the meeting in Alligator Woods, on August 29, 1793, the leading French official on Saint Domingue realized that there was no point in opposing Toussaint and his armies. The slaves had freed themselves. And the following February, Paris agreed. The ideal of brotherhood announced by the revolutionaries of Paris finally included the sugar workers of Saint Domingue. Which details do the authors include to support the claim in this passage? Select two options.
explanations of how revolutionary ideas spread to Saint Domingue examples of revolutionary ideas from other countries
In the Age of Honey, people tasted the neighborhood where they lived. From a light orange-blossom flavor that is almost a perfume to dark buckwheat with a hint of soil and grain, honey tastes like local flowers. And that was only part of its appeal. Bees work very hard, and it is easy to see that a queen bee is surrounded by worker bees that protect and serve her. To the ancients, a beehive was perfect, for it brought a gift of sweetness to people while being a mirror of their lives—a king or queen served by loyal subjects. Which is the authors' purpose for writing this passage?
to inform readers about the cultural and historical significance of honey
