Source A.
The Aztecs believed they lived in the age of the Fifth Sun. Four times previously, they wrote, the earth and all the people who lived on it had been destroyed. They predicted their own world would end in earthquakes and hunger. In the Aztec year Thirteen Flint, volcanoes erupted, sickness and hunger spread, wild beasts attacked children, and an eclipse of the sun darkened the sky. Did some priest wonder whether the Fifth Sun was approaching its end? In time, the Aztecs learned that Europeans called the year Thirteen Flint 1492.
1. What is the Thesis of Source A?
2. What list the evidence that is provided?
3. Weigh the Evidence in Source A (what statements support the thesis the best and why)
4. Are there any Assumptions in Source A?
Source B.
Technological advances and the growing strength of newly powerful national rulers made possible the European explorations of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Each country craved easy access to African and Asian goods-silk, dyes, perfumes, jewels, sugar, gold, and especially spices. Pepper, cloves, cinnamon, and nutmeg were desirable not only for seasoning food but also because they were believed to have medicinal and magical properties. Their allure stemmed largely from their rarity, their extraordinary cost, and their mysterious origins. They passed through so many hands en route to London or Seville that no European knew exactly where they came from. (Nutmeg, for example, grew only on nine tiny islands in the Moluccas, now eastern Indonesia.) Avoiding intermediaries in Venice and Constantinople, and acquiring such valuable products directly, would improve a nation's balance of trade and its standing relative to other countries, in addition to supplying its wealthy leaders with coveted luxury items.
5. What is the Thesis of Source B?
6. What list the Evidence that is provided?
7. Weigh the Evidence in Source B (what statements support the thesis the best and why)
8. Are there any Assumptions in Source B?
Source C.
Diseases carried west from Europe and Africa had a devastating impact on the Americas. Indians fell victim to microbes that had long infested the other continents and had repeatedly killed hundreds of thousands but had also often left survivors with some measure of immunity. The statistics from these virgin-soil epidemics are staggering. When Columbus landed on Hispaniola in 1492, approximately half a million people resided there. Fifty years later, that island had fewer than two thousand native inhabitants. Within thirty years of the first landfall at Guanahaní, not one Taíno survived in the Bahamas. Although measles, typhus, influenza, malaria, and other illnesses severely afflicted the native peoples, the greatest killer was smallpox, spread primarily by direct human contact. Overall, historians estimate that the long-term effects of the alien microorganisms could have reduced the precontact American population by as much as 90 percent. The epidemics recurred at twenty- to thirty-year intervals, when bouts often appeared in quick succession, so that weakened survivors of one wave would be felled by a second or third. Large numbers of deaths further disrupted societies already undergoing severe strains caused by colonization, rendering native peoples more vulnerable to droughts, crop failures, and European invaders.
9. What is the Thesis of Source C?
10. What list the Evidence that is provided?
11. Weigh the Evidence in Source C (what statements support the thesis the best and why)
12. Are there any Assumptions in Source C?