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

Read the passage from Sugar Changed the World.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.

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

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.

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.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.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.

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.