Unit 9: Globalization

By the early 2000s, cellular communication technology had spread rapidly across developing regions, such as Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia. In many of these areas, mobile phones allowed communities to bypass the installation of expensive landline telephone infrastructure, connecting rural farmers directly to urban markets and enabling mobile banking services.

Which of the following processes in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries did the development described in the passage most directly contribute to?

The table below shows the estimated average tariff rates of industrialized nations during the second half of the twentieth century.

Which of the following global economic developments in the late twentieth century was most directly facilitated by the trend shown in the table?

The following is an excerpt from a United Nations document adopted in 1979:

"States Parties shall take all appropriate measures to eliminate discrimination against women in the political and public life of the country and, in particular, shall ensure to women, on equal terms with men, the right to vote in all elections and public referenda and to be eligible for election to all publicly elected bodies..."

Which of the following twentieth-century developments is most directly reflected in this document?

"We are confronted with a tragedy of monumental proportions in sub-Saharan Africa. The development of life-saving antiretroviral therapies in the mid-1990s was hailed as a miracle of modern medical science. Yet, for millions of our people, these drugs remain as out of reach as if they had never been invented. The rigid enforcement of international patent laws and the pricing policies of multinational pharmaceutical corporations have created a situation where the wealth of a nation, rather than the severity of its health crisis, determines who lives and who dies of AIDS."
—Adapted from a speech by a South African public health advocate at the International AIDS Conference, 2000

Based on the passage and your knowledge of world history, which of the following best explains the socio-economic limitations of medical technology in the late twentieth century?

The following is an excerpt from a statement by Chico Mendes, a Brazilian union leader and environmentalist, in 1988:

"We realized that in order to guarantee the future of the Amazon, we had to find a way to preserve the forest while also providing a livelihood for the people who live here. The creation of extractive reserves—where rubber tappers and indigenous groups can harvest forest products without destroying the trees—is the only way to prevent the total destruction of our environment by large-scale cattle ranching and logging. Our struggle is not just about trees; it is about the survival of our community and the global climate."

Mendes’s advocacy in the passage is most representative of which of the following late twentieth-century developments?

The following passage is from an essay by a West African sociologist, written in 2002:

"When American hip-hop culture arrived in Senegal in the late 1980s, it was not received as a passive commodity of Western cultural imperialism. Senegalese youth did not simply copy American dress or slang; instead, they transformed rap into a vehicle for political activism and social critique, rooted in the traditional role of the *griot* (oral historian and storyteller). Performing in Wolof rather than English, local artists fused hip-hop beats with traditional Senegalese drumming and addressed local issues such as corruption, poverty, and structural adjustment programs. In doing so, they turned a global medium into a powerful expression of local culture and resistance."
—Souleymane Diallo, sociologist, *Urban Rhythms and Youth Identity*, 2002

The integration of American musical styles with West African oral traditions described in the passage is best understood as an example of which of the following cultural processes?

"The tragedy of the modern pharmacopoeia is that it has developed remedies of peerless efficacy for diseases like tuberculosis and malaria, yet these remedies remain as distant from the populations of the Global South as they were before their discovery. Under the fiscal austerity mandated by international lending agencies, public health budgets were slashed, clinics shuttered, and supply chains fractured. Thus, the biological victory of the laboratory has been defeated by the economic logic of the market, turning diseases that are technically curable into ongoing sentences of poverty and death."

—Report on global health equity in developing nations, c. 1999

Which of the following developments in the late twentieth century best explains the socio-economic limitations of medical technologies described in the passage?

"In 1977, when we started the Green Belt Movement, I was active in the National Council of Women of Kenya... I came to understand that when the environment is destroyed, plundered or mismanaged, we undermine our quality of life and that of future generations. Tree planting became a natural choice to address some of the initial needs that women identified. Also, tree planting is simple, attainable and guarantees quick, successful results within a reasonable amount of time...

Although the Green Belt Movement’s initial focus was grass-roots tree planting, it developed into a vehicle for empowering citizens, especially women, to take action against environmental degradation, poverty, and systemic political corruption."
—Wangari Maathai, Kenyan environmentalist and political activist, Nobel Peace Prize lecture, 2004

Which of the following best explains how the Green Belt Movement, as described in the passage, represents a departure from earlier state-directed developmental policies of the mid-twentieth century?

"The miracle seeds of the Green Revolution were supposed to banish hunger from the Third World. But in Punjab, where the new seeds were first introduced in India, the result has been ecological devastation and social unrest. Soils have been depleted of nutrients; the water table has plummeted because of the intensive irrigation required; and farmers have been driven into deep debt to pay for expensive chemical inputs. Far from being a triumph of ecological harmony, this model of development has replaced diverse, resilient local food systems with monocultures that are vulnerable to pests and dependent on external, fossil-fuel-based technologies."

���Vandana Shiva, Indian environmentalist and social activist, The Violence of the Green Revolution, 1991

Which of the following developments in the late twentieth century most directly contributed to the debates described in the passage?

"Neoliberalism, as a global system, aims to destroy all barriers to the flow of capital and the exploitation of labor. For the indigenous peoples of Chiapas, the entry into force of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) is the final blow, a death sentence that strips us of our communal lands (ejidos) and integrates our resources into a global market that values profit over human survival. We resist this globalization because it is not an exchange between equals, but a new form of conquest that erases our cultures, impoverishes our communities, and robs us of our sovereignty."
— Communiqué from the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN), Mexico, 1994

Which of the following developments in the late twentieth century most directly contributed to the protest and resistance described in the passage?

"The introduction of containerization has revolutionized the carriage of general cargo. The speed of transit, the reduction of damage and pilferage, and the savings in packing costs have all contributed to a significant reduction in total transport costs. However, containerization requires heavy capital investment in specialized ships, containers, port facilities, and inland transport networks. For developing countries, this poses severe financial challenges, potentially widening the economic gap between developed and developing nations as trade increasingly concentrates in highly automated ports."

— United Nations Conference on Trade and Development, report on containerization, 1970

The technological shift described in the passage most directly contributed to which of the following global economic developments in the late twentieth century?

“The global campaign to eradicate malaria, launched in 1955, relied heavily on the spraying of DDT and the administration of chloroquine. While it achieved dramatic success in Europe, North America, and parts of East Asia, the campaign stalled and was eventually abandoned in much of sub-Saharan Africa. The failure was not due to a lack of scientific tools, but to a lack of basic health infrastructure, political instability, and the rapid evolution of resistance in both mosquitoes and parasites. In the poorest regions of the world, malaria remained a disease of underdevelopment, showing that technology alone cannot solve problems deeply rooted in social and economic inequality.”

—Adapted from a historical analysis of mid-twentieth-century global health initiatives

Based on the passage and your knowledge of world history, which of the following best explains why technological innovations in medicine did not lead to the universal eradication of infectious diseases in the late twentieth century?

AGRICULTURAL DATA FOR INDIA, 1960–1990

*Source: Government of India, Ministry of Agriculture and Farmers Welfare, historical statistical reports.*

Which of the following developments in the late twentieth century best explains the trends shown in the table?

"We, the Governments participating in the Fourth World Conference on Women, gathered here in Beijing in September 1995...

Convinced that:

Women's empowerment and their full participation on the basis of equality in all spheres of society, including participation in the decision-making process and access to power, are fundamental for the achievement of equality, development and peace;

...

The explicit recognition and reaffirmation of the right of all women to control all aspects of their health, in particular their own fertility, is basic to their empowerment..."
-- United Nations, Beijing Declaration, September 1995

Based on the passage and your knowledge of world history, which of the following best explains the global context that gave rise to this declaration?

"We are told that to qualify for the assistance of the international financial institutions, we must slash our spending on health, education, and social services, and open our domestic markets to foreign competition. But the logic of these structural adjustment programs ignores the reality that a state cannot build a stable economy on the backs of an impoverished and uneducated workforce. The conditions imposed upon us do not foster development; rather, they compromise our national sovereignty and bind us to a global system where the terms of trade are permanently tilted against the developing world."
— Julius Nyerere, former President of Tanzania, address to the international community, 1980s

The critique expressed in the passage most directly challenges which of the following assumptions of global economic institutions in the late twentieth century?

"We do not wish to impoverish the environment any further and yet we cannot for a moment forget the grim poverty of large numbers of people. Are not poverty and need the greatest polluters? For instance, unless we are in a position to provide employment and purchasing power for the daily necessities of the tribal people and those who live in or around our forests, we cannot prevent them from combing the forest for food and livelihood, from poaching, and from despoiling the vegetation. . . . How can we speak to those who live in villages and in slums about keeping the oceans clean and the air fresh when their own lives are contaminated at the source? The environment cannot be improved in conditions of poverty."

—Indira Gandhi, Prime Minister of India, address to the United Nations Conference on the Human Environment, Stockholm, 1972

Which of the following best explains how the perspective expressed in the passage reflects a broader historical debate about the environment in the late twentieth century?

“In the early 1980s, the emergence of a new syndrome, later named Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome (AIDS), challenged the mid-century medical consensus that infectious diseases were on the verge of permanent defeat in the developed world. While the development of antiretroviral therapies (ART) in the 1990s transformed HIV/AIDS from a fatal epidemic into a manageable chronic condition for patients who could access them, the high cost of these treatments created a stark division. In sub-Saharan Africa, which accounted for the vast majority of global infections, access to these life-saving drugs was severely restricted for years due to patent protections and underfunded healthcare systems, leading to millions of preventable deaths before international agreements and generic manufacturing lowered costs.”

Which of the following best explains the global disparities in access to the medical technologies described in the passage?

"The Special Economic Zones are a window—a window of technology, of management, of knowledge, and of foreign policy. From the Special Economic Zones, we can import technology, obtain knowledge, and learn how to manage. Management is also a form of knowledge. The Special Economic Zones will become bases for opening our country to the outside world, increasing our knowledge, and training our personnel."
—Deng Xiaoping, "On the Construction of Special Economic Zones," 1984

Deng Xiaoping's policies, as described in the passage, most directly reflect which of the following global economic developments in the late twentieth century?

Estimated Percentage of Total Deaths by Cause and Region, 1990:

Based on the table and your knowledge of world history, which of the following best explains the contrast in mortality profiles between the two regions in the late twentieth century?

"We only want to know where our children are. They have taken them from their homes, from their jobs, from the streets. The authorities tell us nothing. We appeal to the conscience of the world, to international organizations, and to all mothers, to help us find our children and to put an end to this silent terror."
— Pamphlet distributed by the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, Buenos Aires, Argentina, 1978

Which of the following best explains how the movement described in the passage reflects a broader global shift in calls for reform after 1900?