Question

Help fast!! 40 points!!

Read the passage from Sugar Changed the World.

No one could have seen it at the time, but the invention of beet sugar was not just a challenge to cane. It was a hint—just a glimpse, like a twist that comes about two thirds of the way through a movie—that the end of the Age of Sugar was in sight. For beet sugar showed that in order to create that perfect sweetness you did not need slaves, you did not need plantations, in fact you did not even need cane. Beet sugar was a foreshadowing of what we have today: the Age of Science, in which sweetness is a product of chemistry, not whips.

In 1854 only 11 percent of world sugar production came from beets. By 1899 the percentage had risen to about 65 percent. And beet sugar was just the first challenge to cane. By 1879 chemists discovered saccharine—a laboratory-created substance that is several hundred times sweeter than natural sugar. Today the sweeteners used in the foods you eat may come from corn (high-fructose corn syrup), from fruit (fructose), or directly from the lab (for example, aspartame, invented in 1965, or sucralose—Splenda—created in 1976). Brazil is the land that imported more Africans than any other to work on sugar plantations, and in Brazil the soil is still perfect for sugar. Cane grows in Brazil today, but not always for sugar. Instead, cane is often used to create ethanol, much as corn farmers in America now convert their harvest into fuel.

Which sentence best states the authors' claim in this passage?

a) Today we have many sources of sugar, but sugarcane is still the best source.
b)Advances in the production of sweeteners hastened the end of involuntary servitude.
c)The Age of Science has made the role of modern chemists similar to the former role of slaves.
d)Brazilians make ethanol from sugarcane because they cannot grow corn successfully.

Answer 1

B. Advances in the production of sweeteners hastened the end of involuntary servitude.

Answer 2

The sentence that best states the author’s claim in this passage is B) Advances in the production of sweeteners hastened the end of involuntary servitude

Step-by-step explanation:

At the beginning of the paragraph, the author explains that beet sugar showed the world that they did not need slaves to obtain sugar. Now, sugar can be made in a lab without needing plantations. These statements prove why option B is correct. It implies that slavery was near to an end because of the new alternatives to sugar.