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. How do the details in the passage most support the central idea?
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. Which inference does this passage support?
Read the passage from Sugar Changed the World . The diamond and the house: two family treasures, two parts of the story of sugar. We realized that our two family stories—Marina's great grandparents, brought to Guyana to replace slaves, and Marc's aunt's grandfather, helping to refine an alternative to that same sugar—were just the beginning of a much larger story about a remarkable substance. It is a story of the movement of millions of people, of fortunes made and lost, of brutality and delight—all because of tiny crystals stirred into our coffee, twirled on top of a cake. Sugar, we began to see, changed the world. What is the purpose of this passage?
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. The evidence of enslaved people’s revolt and fight for freedom is
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. How does the author’s use of the word silence affect the tone?
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