AP World History — globalization: technology, disease, environment, rights and culture since 1900

Unit 9 of AP World History: Modern, Globalization, closes the course. Its topics are broad, science and the environment, rights and reform, culture and its critics, and exam questions on them reward specific evidence rather than general statements about a smaller world. This material supplies that evidence, and leaves aside the container ships, supply chains, economic models and international institutions that the category's material on the world since 1900 already covers.

You begin with technology and its effects: how radio, jet travel, satellites, the internet and mobile phones compressed distance, how the Green Revolution raised grain yields in Mexico and South Asia at a real economic and environmental cost, and how antibiotics, vaccines and the eradication of smallpox cut death rates and drove population growth. Disease is the next thread: the influenza pandemic of 1918-1919, carried along wartime routes, and HIV/AIDS, where the gap in access to antiretroviral drugs between rich and poor countries shaped who lived and who died.

The environment comes next. You compare the Kyoto Protocol and the Paris Agreement and the argument over how to share responsibility for greenhouse gases, and you see why the Montreal Protocol on ozone-depleting chemicals succeeded more easily. An invented speech by a delegate from a developing country gives you a position in that debate to identify. The last block covers rights and culture: the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and its limits, the uneven spread of women's suffrage across the century, the multidirectional flows of global culture from Bollywood to K-pop, and the 1999 Seattle protests against the World Trade Organization.

The quiz has twelve questions with explanations for every option, and political debates are presented through the arguments each side actually makes. The flashcards cover the key terms. The written work offers eight open questions to answer by hand, including continuity and change and comparison questions of the kind used in short-answer and long essay questions. The oral exam lets you explain these developments aloud, one question at a time, with brief feedback at the end. Use it during Unit 9 or as part of spring review before the May exam.

• Explain how technology, the Green Revolution and medicine changed lives and population after 1900
• Describe the spread and effects of the 1918 influenza pandemic and HIV/AIDS, including unequal access to treatment
• Explain the debate over responsibility for climate change and why the Montreal Protocol succeeded
• Describe the significance and limits of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the spread of women's suffrage
• Explain globalized culture and resistance to globalization

Practice material written by Zestly, based on the College Board AP World History: Modern course framework, Unit 9 (Globalization): advances in technology and exchange, technological advances and limitations (disease), debates about the environment, calls for reform and responses, globalized culture, resistance to globalization. The climate-conference speech is invented for practice.