Social Sciences and History / Unit 12 SSH 1107 worked example, 60 to 90 seconds
The Green Revolution: Inputs, Transfer, and the Population Link
The idea
Sample question six asks what the Green Revolution did, and the key is that it raised food production to meet population growth. Dorrell's definition: a new agricultural technology of high-yield seeds and fertilizers exported from the core to the periphery to increase their productivity. Its section text names the inputs, higher-yielding varieties of wheat, corn and rice, with fertilizers, pesticides, irrigation and new machines, and the places, the farmlands of South, Southeast and East Asia and Mexico, lifting tens of millions above survival. Finlayson, the witness, supplies the population half: South Asia's historic growth was supported by the Green Revolution, which began in India in the nineteen sixties, when a hybrid rice yielding ten times the traditional seed, called Miracle Rice, answered a famine risk in nineteen sixty-one and spread through Asia.
In practice
Choose the option that pairs higher food production with population growth. Distractors will claim it reduced population, spread organic farming, moved farmers to cities, or originated in the periphery. Given "what were its inputs", seeds, fertilizer, pesticides, irrigation, machinery. Given "where did it spread", Asia and Mexico. Given "what succeeded it", the biorevolution, genetic engineering with the potential to exceed it.
Where people slip
The trap is the direction of transfer: core to periphery, in the anchor's words. The second trap is calling it sustainable or organic; the anchor's sustainable agriculture is a later response to its costs.
Your place on the trail
Every lesson rests on earlier ones and opens later ones. Tap any to jump.
Builds on
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