No one could have seen it at the time, but the invention of beet sugar was not just a challenge to cane. It was a hint—just a glimpse, like a twist that comes about two thirds of the way through a movie—that the end of the Age of Sugar was in sight. For beet sugar showed that in order to create that perfect sweetness you did not need slaves, you did not need plantations, in fact you did not even need cane. Beet sugar was a foreshadowing of what we have today: the Age of Science, in which sweetness is a product of chemistry, not whips.
In 1854 only 11 percent of world sugar production came from beets. By 1899 the percentage had risen to about 65 percent. And beet sugar was just the first challenge to cane. By 1879 chemists discovered saccharine—a laboratory-created substance that is several hundred times sweeter than natural sugar. Today the sweeteners used in the foods you eat may come from corn (high-fructose corn syrup), from fruit (fructose), or directly from the lab (for example, aspartame, invented in 1965, or sucralose—Splenda—created in 1976). Brazil is the land that imported more Africans than any other to work on sugar plantations, and in Brazil the soil is still perfect for sugar. Cane grows in Brazil today, but not always for sugar. Instead, cane is often used to create ethanol, much as corn farmers in America now convert their harvest into fuel.
Which sentence best states the authors' claim in this passage?
Today we have many sources of sugar, but sugarcane is still the best source.
Advances in the production of sweeteners hastened the end of involuntary servitude.
The Age of Science has made the role of modern chemists similar to the former role of slaves.
Brazilians make ethanol from sugarcane because they cannot grow corn successfully.
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The sentence that best states the authors' claim in this passage is:
Advances in the production of sweeteners hastened the end of involuntary servitude.
This aligns with the author's argument that the development of beet sugar and other sweeteners reduced the reliance on slave labor associated with sugarcane production, marking a transition to an era where sweetness is produced through scientific means rather than through exploitation.
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