The Muslims worked out a new form of farming to handle sugar, which came to be called 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 about plantations?
"The Muslims worked out a new form of farming to handle sugar, which came to be called the sugar plantation."
"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."
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The text evidence that best supports the author's claim about plantations is:
"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."
This statement clearly highlights the defining characteristic of a plantation, which is its focus on producing a single product for sale, differentiating it from a traditional farm that produces multiple types of crops and goods.
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