Read the passage from Sugar Changed the World. The Muslims worked out a new form of farming to handle sugar, which came to be called the sugar plantation. A plantation was not a new technology but, rather, a new way of organizing planting, growing, cutting, and refining a crop. On a regular farm there may be cows, pigs, and chickens; fields of grain; orchards filled with fruit—many different kinds of foods to eat or sell. By contrast, the plantation had only one purpose: to create a single product that could be grown, ground, boiled, dried, and sold to distant markets. Since one cannot live on sugar, the crop grown on plantations could not even feed the people who harvested it. Never before in human history had farms been run this way, as machines designed to satisfy just one craving of buyers who could be thousands of miles away. 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. Which text evidence best supports the authors' claim about plantations?
Read the passage from Sugar Changed the World . The only way to make a lot of sugar is to engineer a system in which an army of workers swarms through the fields, cuts the cane, and hauls the pile to be crushed into a syrup that flows into the boiling room. There, laboring around the clock, workers cook and clean the bubbling liquid so that the sweetest syrup turns into the sweetest sugar. This is not farming the way men and women had done it for thousands of years in the Age of Honey. It is much more like a factory, where masses of people must do every step right, on time, together, or the whole system collapses. What claim do the authors make in this passage?
Read the passage from Sugar Changed the World . Starting around 1800, sugar became the staple food that allowed the English factories—the most advanced economies in the world—to run. Sugar supplied the energy, the hint of nutrition, the sweet taste to go with the warmth of tea that even the poorest factory worker could look forward to. Sugar was a necessity. Why were the English the first to build factories to mill cloth? Because of the wealth they gained, the trade connections they made, and the banking systems they developed in the slave and sugar trade. Indeed, the cheap cloth from the factories was used to clothe the slaves. English factories, you might say, were built, run, and paid for by sugar. In 1800, when the English were consuming their eighteen pounds of sugar a year, around 250,000 tons of sugar was produced worldwide—almost all sent to Europe. A century later, in 1900, when sugar was used in jams, cakes, syrups, and tea, and every modern country was filled with factories, world production of sugar reached six million tons. By that time, the average person in England ate ninety pounds of sugar a year—and in the early twentieth century, that number kept rising. (Americans today eat only about 40 pounds of cane sugar a year, but that is because other forms of sweeteners, such as corn syrup, are now cheaper than cane sugar. If you consider all forms of sweetener, Americans eat an average of 140 pounds every year.) How do the details in this passage support the authors’ purpose?
Read the passage from Sugar Changed the World. From the 1750s on, sugar transformed how Europeans ate. Chefs who served the wealthy began to divide meals up. Where sugar had previously been used either as a decoration (as in the wedding feast) or as a spice to flavor all courses, now it was removed from recipes for meat, fish, and vegetables and given its own place—in desserts. Dessert as the extremely sweet end to the meal was invented because so much sugar was available. But the wealthy were not the only ones whose meals were changing. Sugar became a food, a necessity, and the foundation of the diet for England's poorest workers. How does the use of the word transformed support the claim in this passage?
Read the passage and study the image and caption from Sugar Changed the World . Open image in full-screen view Caption: The first factories were places like this cotton mill in Manchester, England. All over England, in sooty cities such as Manchester and Liverpool, when the factory whistle blew, workers would set down their presses and file out to drink a quick cup of tea sweetened with sugar—usually dipping a piece of bread in the warm drink. Soon a smart manufacturer figured out that this break, and the need for a jolt of sweetness, was an opportunity. English workers were offered sugary cookies and candies—what we call today energy bars—that quick pick-me-up that helped workers to make it through their long shifts. Starting around 1800, sugar became the staple food that allowed the English factories—the most advanced economies in the world—to run. Sugar supplied the energy, the hint of nutrition, the sweet taste to go with the warmth of tea that even the poorest factory worker could look forward to. Sugar was a necessity. How does the image support the text?
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