Read the passage from Sugar Changed the World. The Muslims worked out a new form of farming to handle sugar, which came to be ca
lled the sugar plantation. A plantation was not a new technology but, rather, a new way of organizing planting, growing, cutting, and refining a crop. On a regular farm there may be cows, pigs, and chickens; fields of grain; orchards filled with fruit—many different kinds of foods to eat or sell. By contrast, the plantation had only one purpose: to create a single product that could be grown, ground, boiled, dried, and sold to distant markets. Since one cannot live on sugar, the crop grown on plantations could not even feed the people who harvested it. Never before in human history had farms been run this way, as machines designed to satisfy just one craving of buyers who could be thousands of miles away. On a plantation there were large groups of workers—between fifty and several hundred. The mill was right next to the crop, so that growing and grinding took place in the same spot. Which text evidence best supports the authors' claim? "A plantation was not a new technology but, rather, a new way of organizing planting, growing, cutting, and refining a crop." "By contrast, the plantation had only one purpose: to create a single product that could be grown, ground, boiled, dried, and sold to distant markets." "Since one cannot live on sugar, the crop grown on plantations could not even feed the people who harvested it." "The mill was right next to the crop, so that growing and grinding took place in the same spot."
