✅ Checkpoint: Turning Points and Their Drivers

By Better Wise

Quiz

  1. In the lesson on the Agricultural Revolution, what does the lesson say matters more than raw abundance when explaining what a surplus can do?
    • The total volume of food produced each year
    • The number of domesticated animal species available
    • The size of the population before farming began
    • Storability, because stored grain can be counted, taxed, moved, and controlled
  2. According to the lesson on empires and trade networks, what is the first question to ask when reading a trade network as a map of power?
    • Which goods were the most expensive?
    • Who collects the toll?
    • How long was the route end to end?
    • Which language did the merchants speak?
  3. Why could pre-industrial organic economies not sustain growth in output per person?
    • Almost all energy came from recently grown plants or muscle, so fuel competed with food for land
    • They had no knowledge of tools or metalworking
    • They lacked markets and long-distance trade entirely
    • Their populations were too small to support specialization
  4. Which of the following are costs of the shift to farming that the lesson names? Select all that apply.
    • Greater fragility, because dependence on a few crops made a failed harvest a famine
    • Worse nutrition and more infectious disease
    • Durable inequality, since stored wealth could be inherited and monopolized
    • The complete disappearance of long-distance exchange
  5. Which statements about the Industrial Revolution match the lesson? Select all that apply.
    • Pomeranz argues Britain's advantage over the Yangzi delta came partly from coal lying near its industrial centers
    • The Luddites were skilled textile workers whose bargaining position collapsed, not anti-technology romantics
    • The productivity break is best measured by total national output rather than output per person
    • Watt's separate condenser cut fuel use per stroke compared with earlier engines
  6. Wrigley's term for the farmland that would have been needed to grow the energy that coal replaced is ____.
  7. The decades around 1800 to 1840, when output per worker rose while real wages stagnated, are known as ____.
  8. Payment in goods, labor, or soldiers assessed by a powerful center on the regions it controls is called ____.
  9. In your own words, explain how a storable agricultural surplus turns into social hierarchy, using Uruk and Çatalhöyük as your comparison. Aim for four to six sentences.
  10. Explain why the Industrial Revolution produced a genuine productivity break, while empire-scale trade did not. Use at least two pieces of evidence from the lesson (for example coal output, cotton yarn prices, or Maddison's estimates).

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