Sugar Changed the World, Part 4: Building Claims — Unit test Answers

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 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.

A word’s denotation is

Read the excerpt from "Elevator Systems of the Eiffel Tower, 1889" by Robert M. Vogel.The first complete elevator machine in the United States, constructed in 1855, was a complex and inefficient contrivance built around an oscillating-cylinder steam engine. The advantages of an elevator system independent of the mill drive quickly became apparent, and by 1860 improved steam elevator machines were being produced in some quantity, but almost exclusively for freight service. It is not clear when the first elevator was installed explicitly for passenger service, but it was probably in 1857, when Otis placed one in a store on Broadway at Broome Street in New York.In the decade following the Civil War, tall buildings had just begun to emerge; and, although the skylines of the world’s great cities were still dominated by church spires, there was increasing activity in the development of elevator apparatus adapted to the transportation of people as well as of merchandise. Operators of hotels and stores gradually became aware of the commercial advantages to be gained by elevating their patrons even one or two floors above the ground, by machinery. The steam engine formed the foundation of the early elevator industry, but as building heights increased it was gradually replaced by hydraulic, and ultimately by electrical, systems.

Read the two passages from Sugar Changed the World.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'iI came seeing the dreamBut my tears now flowIn the canefieldsWhen 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 caneI carry the stalks from the fieldTogether, the two of usWe get by

Read the excerpt from The Building of Manhattan.A temporary, small narrow-gauge track system was installed on each floor as it was needed. This enabled the material to be moved from the truck at ground level onto dump carts, raised by elevator to the designated floor, wheeled onto the track, and moved quickly to the exact spot needed. Turntables built into the track allowed the carts to be shifted about in any direction.

Read the excerpt from "The Invention of the Sewing Machine" by Grace Rogers Cooper.Isaac Singer, whose name is known around the world as a manufacturer of sewing machines, was the eighth child of poor German immigrants. Isaac was born on October 27, 1811, in Pittstown, New York, but most of his early life was spent in Oswego. He worked as a mechanic and cabinetmaker, but acquired an interest in the theater. Under the name of Isaac Merritt, he went to Rochester and became an actor. In 1839, during an absence from the theater, he completed his first invention, a mechanical excavator, which he sold for $2000. With the money Singer organized a theatrical troupe of his own, which he called “The Merritt Players.” When the group failed in Fredericksburg, Ohio, Singer was stranded for lack of funds.

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 excerpt from The Evolution of Useful Things.Clearly, existing means of masking had serious flaws. One day, when he was dropping off a batch of waterproof sandpaper, Drew overheard some body-shop workers cursing two-tone painting. The young technician, who had studied engineering through correspondence-school courses, promised he would make something to solve the problem.

On what basis should a reader evaluate evidence for effectiveness? Select three options.similarity to the reader’s viewsrelevance to the central ideaconnection to one part of the claimsufficiency to support the purposecredibility of the source

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

Read the passage from Sugar Changed the World.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.

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.

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.

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.