Question

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'i

I came seeing the dream

But my tears now flow

In the canefields

When 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 cane

I carry the stalks from the field

Together, the two of us

We get by

Which statement best explains how the authors develop their claim across the two passages?

A) Both passages share historical details to support the claim that the lives of sugarcane workers in different countries were essentially the same.
B) Both passages use facts and details to support the claim that sugar workers in different places used music to express themselves and relieve the pressures of brutal work.
C)Both passages use facts and details to support the claim that sugarcane was the most powerful economic force throughout the world.
D) Both passages include historical details to support the claim that songs allowed owners to recognize the importance of enslaved people’s cultures.

Answer 1

B) Both passages use facts and details to support the claim that sugar workers in different places used music to express themselves and relieve the pressures of brutal work.

Step-by-step explanation:

According to the two passages from "Sugar Changed the World," the authors claim that living under the extremely difficult conditions of the slavery system, enslaved young men were inspired to create new forms of music. Examples of these new forms of expression through music are jazz, bomba, maculelê and holehole bushi.

Answer 2

I would contend that the right answer is the B) Both passages use facts and details to support the claim that sugar workers in different places used music to express themselves and relieve the pressures of brutal work. The first paragraph particularly stresses the significant young age of the numerous men who were enslaved in sugar plantations in Louisiana, since, in the second paragraph, the author suggests the premise that jazz was born in that state precisely because of that ample population of male teenagers who needed to express themselves, voiced who they were, and, most importantly, survive, and jazz gave them the opportunity to do that. The author also points out that enslaved people in other areas equally resorted to music in order to have a voice and to remind themselves that they were human beings, not machinery. The other two paragraphs include specific folk songs that sugar workers, slaved or not, sang in order to mitigate the hardships of their new lives, far away from their homeland (Japan and various countries in Africa), and to find some solace.