Environmental Consequences
Introduced| English | Meaning |
|---|---|
| bubonic plague/bjuːˈbɒnɪk pleɪɡ/ | A form of plague characterised by swollen lymph nodes, historically associated with the Black Death. |
Crops and pathogens travel the same roads
- There was continued diffusion of crops and pathogens, with epidemic diseases, including the bubonic plague 黑死病, along trade routes.
- The CED puts crops and diseases in one sentence on purpose: both are biological, both move with people.
- So a route's benefits and its dangers have the same cause and cannot be separated.
Select all the crop diffusions the CED names.
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Maize crosses the Atlantic in the Columbian Exchange, unit 4.
Three crop diffusions to know
- Bananas in Africa — a Southeast Asian crop that reshaped African farming and settlement.
- New rice varieties in East Asia — the same Champa rice that fed Song commercialisation.
- The spread of citrus in the Mediterranean — carried westward through Muslim agricultural networks.
Connected land and sea routes helped epidemic disease spread; local consequences varied
Crops and pathogens diffused along the same trade routes.
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The CED puts them in one sentence — both are biological and both move with people.
The plague followed the network
- The bubonic plague spread along the same caravan and shipping routes that carried silk and porcelain.
- It reached Europe, the Middle East and North Africa within a few years and killed a large share of the population.
- So the fourteenth-century death toll is not a separate story from the trade boom — it is the same network, running in reverse.
Follow the network's most consequential cargo
The pathogens travelled because the network worked — the unit's argument about goods, applied to disease.
The fourteenth-century plague is best understood as...
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It travelled the same routes as silk and porcelain — the same network, running in reverse.
The plague and the trade boom are the same story. Crops and pathogens diffused along trade routes in the CED's single sentence — so an answer that treats fourteenth-century mortality as an interruption of connectivity has missed that it was a consequence of it.
The plague is the largest single reason a city on a busy route could ____ rather than grow.
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Which links this subtopic back to 2.5's varied city fates.
Connect it back to the cities
- Subtopic 2.5 said city fates varied, with real decline as well as growth.
- The plague is the largest single reason a city on a busy route could shrink rather than grow.
- Linking 2.6 to 2.5 is the cheapest way to make an answer look like it understands the unit rather than the subtopic.
Put the environmental-effects answer in order.
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The last sentence is the analysis; the first two are the evidence.
An environmental-effects answer
- Name one crop diffusion and say what it changed about how people fed themselves.
- Name the plague and say what route carried it.
- Then say the sentence that ties them: the same connectivity did both, and a society could not have one without the other.
Bananas reach Africa along the same Indian Ocean routes that later carry the plague; new rice varieties reach East Asia along the routes that carry porcelain out. A society that closes its ports keeps out both the crop and the pathogen — which is why no society in this period could take only the benefit.
Crops and pathogens continued to diffuse along trade routes, including epidemic disease and the bubonic plague. Crop diffusions: bananas in Africa, new rice varieties in East Asia, citrus in the Mediterranean. The same connectivity produced both benefit and mortality — and explains why city fates varied.
Write from bananas in Africa
- Bananas were brought from Southeast Asia toward Africa.
- The same networks later carried the plague.
What did the new crop do, and what else travelled?
Trade routes carried both food crops and disease.
What new crop reached Africa along these routes?
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Bananas were one of the crop diffusions.