Topic 4 AP Exam Practice
Multiple-Choice Questions
Questions 1 to 3 refer to the passage below.
“Fermented drinks such as alcohol also have the benefits of killing parasites and bringing liquid calories to the diet, but by the start of the 18th century beer production was eating up nearly half of the wheat harvest in Britain. There was no possible way for Britain’s domestic agriculture to feed the rapidly expanding population and keep them in beer, too. There just wasn’t enough farmland for every new mouth in the industrial era. Calories had to come from an outside source, one beyond the boundaries of the British Isles, from the wider shores of the empire. The pursuit of food has always shaped the development of society, and in the days of the Victorian empire, the very start of our modern industrialized global food-chain, tea with milk and sugar became the answer to Britain’s growing need for cheap nutrition.”
Sarah Rose, For All the Tea in China: Espionage, Empire
and the Secret Formula for the World’s Favourite [Favorite]
Drink, 2009
1. The example in the passage highlights which common imperial pattern?
- (A) the importation of cash crops from the colonies
- (B) the development of new shipping capacities
- (C) the export of foodstuffs to colonial holdings
- (D) the transfer of industrial developments to colonies
2. How does Britain’s answer to the “growing need for cheap nutrition” relate to the Western Hemisphere?
- (A) The Americas provided dairy products for Britain
- (B) The Americas provided tea for Britain
- (C) The Americas provided indentured servants for Britain
- (D) The Americas provided sugar for Britain
3. What impact did the Industrial Revolution have upon nonindustrial countries?
- (A) They became export countries.
- (B) The Industrial Revolution spread to these areas.
- (C) The colonial economy became self-sufficient.
- (D) Profits earned by these nonindustrial countries were used to create a growing middle class.
Short-Answer Questions
1. Use the passage below to answer all parts of the question that follows.
“Around the middle of the 19th century, Uruguay was dominated by the latifundium [a large landed estate or ranch, typically worked by enslaved people], with its ill-defined boundaries and enormous herds of native cattle, from which only the hides were exported to Great Britain and part of the meat, as jerky, to Brazil and Cuba. There was a shifting rural population that worked on the large estates and lived largely on the parts of beef carcasses that could not be marketed abroad. Often the landowners were also the caudillos [military or political leaders] of the Blanco or Colorado political parties, the protagonists of civil wars that a weak government was unable to prevent (Barrán and Nahum, 1984, 655). This picture still holds, even if it has been excessively stylized, neglecting the importance of subsistence [the act of supporting oneself] or domestic-market oriented peasant production.”
Luis Bértola, An Overview of the Economic History of Uruguay since the 1870s, 2008
2. Answer all parts of the question that follows.