PT110.S4.P4.Q24

PrepTest 110 - Section 4 - Passage 4 - Question 24

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P1

While historians once propagated the myth that Africans who were brought to the New World as slaves contributed little of value but their labor, a recent study by Amelia Wallace Vernon helps to dispel this notion by showing that Africans introduced rice and the methods of cultivating it into what is now the United States in the early eighteenth century. ███

Conventional View / New View · African slaves in US contributed only their labor / No, they also introduced rice cultivation
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Evidence for New View · Document with instructions to bring slaves with knowledge of rice cultivation to the New World
Document dates the instructions to 1718, decades before the arrival of the French Acadians who were previously thought to have introduced rice cultivation to the New World.
P2

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Question / Phenomenon · Why did African Americans grow rice?
After all, the economy was dedicated to maximizing cotton production.
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Two Answers · One during slavery and one after slavery
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Answer 1 / Explanation · Plantation owners also ate rice; growing rice was a relief for slaves
Plantation owners wanted to eat rice so demanded it to be grown. Growing rice was a form of relief for the slaves because they could work without supervision.
P3

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Question / Phenomenon · Why, after slavery ended, did African Americans grow rice?
At that point, African Americans preferred to eat corn and their landlords only wanted cotton as payment.
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Answer 2 / Explanation · Growing rice wasn't the point. It was to transform the land.
P4

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Explanation · They transformed the land to make it their own
They did grow rice but that wasn't the point. They wanted to transform the land because they viewed the land as an extension of themselves and so wanted to take care of it and really make it theirs.
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Hypothesis · Rice cultivation may also have been a political act
Transforming the land to grow rice where previously the land was used to grown cotton is a symbolic and political act to assert their freedom and ownership over the land.
Passage Style
Phenomenon-hypothesis (RC)
Single position
Show answer
24.

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a

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The action in (A) isn’t performed out of a desire to nurture, or a sense of ownership, or to make a political statement. Rather, the neighbors plant flowers for other reasons — to make the area look better and to create a boundary.

5%
b

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The action in (B) isn’t performed out of a desire to nurture, or a sense of ownership, or to make a political statement. Rather, the neighbors plant flowers to make money.

1%
c

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The action in (C) isn’t performed out of a desire to nurture, or a sense of ownership, or to make a political statement. Rather, the neighbors neuter animals out of civic duty — this is a feeling of obligation toward society. Another motivation is to delay the city in taking its own actions to reduce overpopulation. That has nothing to do with nurturing, ownership, or political action.

3%
d

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This is the most analogous. The neighbors clean up the lot out of a sense of ownership, just as the African Americans planted rice out of a sense of ownership. The neighbors also seek to protest the city’s neglect of the neighborhood, which gives their clean-up a political dimension.

85%
e

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The action in (E) isn’t performed out of a desire to nurture, or a sense of ownership, or to make a political statement. Rather, the neighbors feel a sense of obligation toward the community, and also want to solve the practical problems caused by a daycare closure.

6%

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