Take this Exam: AP World History — the world from 1200 to 1450 | Zestly

Question 1

The Silk Roads carried silk, porcelain and precious stones; the Indian Ocean network carried those too, but also timber, grain, cotton cloth and salt in quantity. What best explains the difference?

Accepted Answer

A ship carries vastly more per unit of cost than a pack animal, so goods of low value by weight can be moved profitably by sea and not by land

Answer

The monsoon winds were strong enough to move only dense cargoes such as stone and metal

Answer

Merchants in the Indian Ocean were forbidden to deal in silk and spices, and turned to bulk goods instead

Answer

Heavy goods were barred from the overland routes by rulers protecting local producers

Question 2

On what did the wealth of the Mali empire in the fourteenth century principally rest?

Accepted Answer

Control of the routes on which West African gold moved north and Saharan salt moved south, and the taxes levied on that traffic

Answer

Export of manufactured steel to European markets, which had no comparable production of its own

Answer

Isolation from long-distance trade, the Sahara being impassable to organised caravans

Answer

Command of the Atlantic coast and the shipping that used it

Question 3

A fast-ripening, drought-tolerant rice variety reached southern China from Champa, in what is now Vietnam, and spread widely under the Song. What followed from it?

Accepted Answer

Two harvests a year became possible on land that had yielded one, and the population rose steeply

Answer

Rice cultivation was given up in favour of herding, which the new conditions suited better

Answer

Farmers left the rice regions, since the new variety needed less labour than the land could occupy

Answer

Harvests failed across the south, and the older varieties had to be reinstated

Question 4

Comparing how agricultural labour was organised in Song China and in western Europe around 1300, what was the principal difference?

Answer

Both systems rested on chattel slavery, differing only in how slaves were acquired

Answer

Neither had settled agriculture of any scale, both depending chiefly on herding

Answer

European cultivators owed labour and dues to a lord by inherited status, while most Chinese cultivators were tenants or smallholders paying taxes and rents in a monetised economy

Answer

Chinese cultivators were bound to a lord by inherited obligation, while European peasants held their land outright and owed nothing

Question 5

The plague that reached the Mediterranean in 1347 spread across Eurasia and North Africa within a few years. What does its path tell us about the period?

Answer

That it moved only between neighbouring villages, and long-distance routes played no part

Answer

That the routes carrying goods, travellers and ideas also carried the pathogen, and did so at the speed of commerce

Answer

That it was spread deliberately as an instrument of policy by states seeking to reduce population

Answer

That infection passed through the trade goods themselves, silk and spices in particular