Investigation – The Modern Revolution
STUDENT MATERIALSSTUDENT MATERIALSS-1BIG HISTORY PROJECT / ASSESSMENTINVESTIGATION—THE MODERN REVOLUTIONPreparation• Download the BHP Writing RubricPurposeThis Investigation serves as the final writing assessment for the course and will help give you a sense of the growth you’ve made throughout the course in understanding a range of texts and using evidence to support your ideas. Additionally, this Investigation asks you to explore the major changes of the Modern era to understand both the positive and negative impacts of Industrialization.ProcessDay 1It’s time for it’s time for one last Investigation. This Investigation asks you to respond to the following question: To what extent has the Modern Revolution been a positive or a negative force? Remember that you responded to this Investigation prompt in Unit 1 but this time, you’ll have all the information you’ve learned throughout the course to help you answer the question.First, your teacher will ask you to write down your conjectures—best guesses— about whether the Modern Revolution has been a positive or negative force. This is not a yes or no question. Think about whether the Modern Revolution—which has made our world more complex and interesting, as well as more fragile and dangerous—has led to positive or negative changes. In what ways have our networks have expanded? These could be related to technology, communication, resources. Does expansion always leads to good results?You’ll have about 5-10 minutes to make notes and think about whether the Modern Revolution has had a good or bad impact.Next, your teacher will either hand out or have you download the Investigation 9 Document Library. As you review each document, you’ll use the graphic organizer to take notes on sources and evaluate the trends of the Modern era.Day 2Now it’s time to write! You’ll develop a five- to six-paragraph essay arguing whether the Modern Revolution has been a positive or negative force. Remember to use information from the Investigation 9 Document Library along with BHP concepts and other information you’ve learned in this unit as evidence to support your argument or opposing point of view. It is also important that you cite the sources you use as evidence in your essay. Unless otherwise noted, this work is licensed under CC BY 4.0. Credit: “Investigation 9”, OER Project, https://www.oerproject.com/
STUDENT MATERIALSSTUDENT MATERIALSS-2BIG HISTORY PROJECT / ASSESSMENTINVESTIGATION—THE MODERN REVOLUTIONINVESTIGATION 9 Directions: Write a five- to six-paragraph essay in response to the prompt below. Make sure to use the documents provided to help support your argument or to acknowledge the opposing point of view. Remember to review the criteria on the BHP Writing Rubric. To what extent has the Modern Revolution been a positive or a negative force?
S-3BIG HISTORY PROJECT / ASSESSMENTName:Date:Name:Date:STUDENT MATERIALSINVESTIGATION—THE MODERN REVOLUTIONTO WHAT EXTENT HAS THE MODERN REVOLUTION BEEN A POSITIVE OR NEGATIVE FORCE?In your research, use the table to help capture information and to organize your thinking.Text 1: Population TrendsTrends / eventsTrend descriptionWhy positive / good?Why negative / bad?Source of informationLife expectancy ratesFertility ratesPopulation sizeText 2: Urban Population GrowthTrends / eventsTrend descriptionWhy positive / good?Why negative / bad?Source of information
S-4BIG HISTORY PROJECT / ASSESSMENTName:Date:Name:Date:STUDENT MATERIALSINVESTIGATION—THE MODERN REVOLUTIONText 3: Literacy and EducationTrends / eventsTrend descriptionWhy positive / good?Why negative / bad?Source of informationIncrease in % and number of literate peopleLiteracy growth rates across societiesLiteracy growth rates within societiesText 4: Inventions and DiscoveriesTrends / eventsTrend descriptionWhy positive / good?Why negative / bad?Source of informationText 5: Vaccines and DiseaseTrends / eventsTrend descriptionWhy positive / good?Why negative / bad?Source of informationIn the United StatesWorldwide
S-5BIG HISTORY PROJECT / ASSESSMENTName:Date:Name:Date:STUDENT MATERIALSINVESTIGATION—THE MODERN REVOLUTIONText 6: Spread of DemocracyTrends / eventsTrend descriptionWhy positive / good?Why negative / bad?Source of informationNumbers of democracies% of democraciesText 7: Wars and Killings by GovernmentTrends / eventsTrend descriptionWhy positive / good?Why negative / bad?Source of informationWars between types of governmentsGovernments killing peopleText 8: Carbon Dioxide Levels Over the Last 10,000 YearsTrends / eventsTrend descriptionWhy positive / good?Why negative / bad?Source of informationOther trends/eventsTrends / eventsTrend descriptionWhy positive / good?Why negative / bad?Source of information
STUDENT MATERIALSSTUDENT MATERIALSS-6BIG HISTORY PROJECT / ASSESSMENTINVESTIGATION—THE MODERN REVOLUTIONInvestigation 0 LibraryText 1: Population Trends ...........................................................................................................................................................................7Text 2: Urban Population Growth ...............................................................................................................................................................8Text 3: Literacy and Education ...................................................................................................................................................................9Text 4: Inventions and Discoveries ............................................................................................................................................................10Text 5: Vaccines and Disease .....................................................................................................................................................................11Text 6: Spread of Democracy .....................................................................................................................................................................12Text 7: Wars and Killings by Government ...................................................................................................................................................13Text 8: Carbon Dioxide Levels Over the Last 10,000 Years ......................................................................................................................14
STUDENT MATERIALSSTUDENT MATERIALSS-7BIG HISTORY PROJECT / ASSESSMENTINVESTIGATION—THE MODERN REVOLUTIONText 1: Population TrendsThe following table shows global trends over the last 300 years in life expectancy, birth rates, and total population size. It also uses those trends to make future predictions to the year 2100 CE. Ronald Lee, an economics professor at the University of California, created this table. The first column shows life expectancy, or how long on average people will live. The second column shows birth rates, or the average number of births per woman. The last column shows the total size of the population in billions.Global Population Trends, 1700–2100Life Expectancy (Years at Birth)Total Fertility Rate (Births per Woman)Population Size (Billions)1700276.0.681800276.0.981900305.21.651950475.02.522000652.76.072050742.08.922100812.09.46Source: Ronald Lee. “The Demographic Transition: Three Centuries of Fundamental Change,” Journal of Economic Perspectives 17, no.4 (Fall 2003): 167–90. Note: This table was slightly modified for use by the Big History Project.
STUDENT MATERIALSSTUDENT MATERIALSS-8BIG HISTORY PROJECT / ASSESSMENTINVESTIGATION—THE MODERN REVOLUTIONText 2: Urban Population GrowthFrom the dawn of agriculture, our ancestors lived a generally rural lifestyle. Most people did not live in cities or urban areas. For example, only 3 percent of the world’s population lived in cities when the Modern Revolution was beginning in 1800. About 200 years later, more than half of the world’s population was urban. Experts think that nearly 70 percent of the world population will be urban by 2050.Also, the number of cities in the world with a population of over 10 million people is growing. According to United Nations publication World Urbanization Prospects: The 2011 Revision, only two cities in the world had a population greater than 10 million people in 1970. By 2011, that number had grown to 23.Percentage of World Population Living in CitiesSource: Graph created using data from World Urbanization Prospects: The 2011 Revision, United Nations, Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Population Division, File 2.
STUDENT MATERIALSSTUDENT MATERIALSS-9BIG HISTORY PROJECT / ASSESSMENTINVESTIGATION—THE MODERN REVOLUTIONText 3: Literacy and EducationIn 1850, only 10 percent of the world’s population, or about 120 million people, could read and write. Today nearly 80 percent of the world’s population, or about 5.1 billion people, are able to do some reading and writing. The percentage of people who are not literate, then, has decreased from 90 percent to about 20 percent in the last 160 years.However, the actual number of illiterate people has increased. In 1850, there were about 1.08 billion people who could not read and write. Today there are about 1.28 billion people without literacy skills.The growth in literacy has not been uniform across or within societies. For example, women are less literate than men: Worldwide – only 88 adult women are considered literate for every 100 adult men.About 100 million children were not enrolled in primary school in 2002, 55 percent of them girls. The vast majority of the world’s adult illiterates live in three regions: South and Southwest Asia, East Asia and the Pacific, and sub-Saharan Africa. However, in recent years literacy rates have increased by more than 10 percent in those areas.Source: United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (2006). “The Making of Literate Societies.” Education for All Global Monitoring Report: Literacy for Life.
STUDENT MATERIALSSTUDENT MATERIALSS-10BIG HISTORY PROJECT / ASSESSMENTINVESTIGATION—THE MODERN REVOLUTIONText 4: Inventions and DiscoveriesBelow is a listing of major inventions or discoveries made between 1800 and the present.YearInventions1800 to 1850• Electric battery (1800)• Steam locomotive (1804)• Canned food (1810)• Spectroscope (1814)• Photography (1816)• Stethoscope (1819)• Lawn mower (1830)• Sewing machine (1830)• Electric telegraph (1833)• Revolver (1835)• Postage stamp (1840)• Antiseptics (1847)1850 to 1899• Elevator (1852)• Bicycle (1861)• Plastic (1862)• Dynamite (1866)• Torpedo (1866)• Typewriter (1868)• Traffic light (1868)• Telephone (1876)• Movies (1877)• Light bulb (1870)• Machine gun (1884)• Automobile (1885)• Drinking straw (1888)• Radio (1895)• X-ray (1895)• Aspirin (1897)• Paper clip (1899)1900 to 1949• Vacuum cleaner (1901)• Airplane (1901)• Assembly line (1908)• Dixie paper cup (1912)• Zipper (1913)• Hair dryer (1920)• Hearing aid (1923)• Television (1923)• Frozen food (1924)• Scotch tape (1926)• Antibiotics (1928)• Helicopter (1936)• Guided missile (1942)• Atomic bomb (1945)• Transistor (1947)• Computer (1948)1950 to now• Credit card (1950)• Robot (1954)• Solar cell (1954)• Video tape recorder (1956)• Satellite (1957)• Computer modem (1958)• Microchip (1958)• First human in space (1961)• ATM cash dispenser (1969)• Internet (1969)• E-mail (1971)• Plastic bottles for liquids• (1972)• Laser printer (1975)• Personal computer (1975)• In-vitro fertilization (1978)• Space telescope (1990)• iPad (2010)
STUDENT MATERIALSSTUDENT MATERIALSS-11BIG HISTORY PROJECT / ASSESSMENTINVESTIGATION—THE MODERN REVOLUTIONText 5: Vaccines and DiseaseVaccines produce immunity to disease by stimulating the production of antibodies. The first successful vaccine was developed by Edward Jenner in 1796 to help prevent smallpox. Since that time, people have developed many vaccines to fight serious and life-threatening diseases.Below is a chart created by the National Centers for Disease Control in the United States. It shows the impact of vaccines on six diseases in the United States. The first column shows the disease. The second column, “Pre-vaccine estimated annual Morbidity Rates,” provides the estimated yearly number of cases of each disease before vaccinations.Remember that this chart refers only to the United States. According to the World Health Organization, there are still many children in the world not protected by vaccines and modern medicine. In 2012, the WHO claimed that each year, there are about 1.5 million children in the world who die from diseases that could be prevented by vaccines.Impact of Vaccines on Disease in the United StatesDiseasePre-vaccine estimated annual Morbidity Rates2010 Reported Cases% DecreaseSmallpox29,0050100%Diphtheria21,0530100%Tetanus580899%Polio16,3160100%Measles530,21761>99%Mumps162,3442>99% Source: Table was modified from National Centers for Disease Control Information on global vaccination from World Health Organization. (2012). “Global Immunization Data.”
STUDENT MATERIALSSTUDENT MATERIALSS-12BIG HISTORY PROJECT / ASSESSMENTINVESTIGATION—THE MODERN REVOLUTIONText 6: Spread of DemocracyCarles Boix, a professor of politics and public affairs at Princeton University, has studied the growth in the number of democracies over the past 200 years. In the text, below he tells us something of what he has learned.By 2000 there were around 100 democracies — almost twice the number in 1989 and about three times as many as there were just after World War II (see graph below).More recently,...democracies have kept cropping up at a steady rate.The majority of mankind may indeed wish to live under free institutions.... But a look at history tells us a more cautionary tale about the chances of democratic progress. The chart below shows that still today, only slightly more than 50 percent of all sovereign states have a democratically constituted government. That proportion is not very different from the share of democracies in the peak years of 1920 and 1955.... Democratic practices appear fragile in the core of the former Soviet Union and in Latin American. And they remain elusive in most of sub-Saharan Africa and in the Middle East.In the graph below, Dr. Boix shows the number and percentages of democracies in the world by year. The gray area shows the number of democracies while the line shows the percentage of democracies.Number and Proportion of Democracies in the World, 1800–2000Source: Carles Boix, “The Roots of Democracy,” Policy Review 135 (February 1, 2006).
STUDENT MATERIALSSTUDENT MATERIALSS-13BIG HISTORY PROJECT / ASSESSMENTINVESTIGATION—THE MODERN REVOLUTIONText 7: Wars and Killings by GovernmentThe Modern Revolution has provided governments new powers of mass communication and transportation, as well as new powerful weapons. Many governments have used these new powers to control their own populations or to wage war on other societies and peoples.Below are two charts that describe two of the ways governments and nations have used the powers given them by the Modern Revolution. The first chart shows the number of wars between different types of governments.The second chart shows the number of people killed by governments. When reading this chart it is important to remember that these are not soldiers killed during war, but civilians.Impact of Vaccines on Disease in the United StatesTypes of CombatantsNumber of WarsDemocracies fighting democracies0Democracies fighting non-democracies155Non-democracies fighting non-democracies198Total Wars, 1816 and 1991353Mass Killings Committed by Governments, 1900—1989TypeNumber of People KilledOwn citizens or people129,547,000Genocide38,566,000Total Murders by Governments, 1900 and 1989169,202,000Source: Charts modified from Israel W. Charney (ed.), Encyclopedia of Genocide (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 1999) 24–25. This reference work includes essays from over 100 experts from many different countries on the Nazi Holocaust, the genocides in Armenia, Cambodia, Rwanda, and the former Yugoslavia, as well as on the Soviet prison system and other mass killings in the 20th century.
STUDENT MATERIALSSTUDENT MATERIALSS-14BIG HISTORY PROJECT / ASSESSMENTINVESTIGATION—THE MODERN REVOLUTIONText 8: Carbon Dioxide Levels Over the Last 10,000 YearsCarbon dioxide is a chemical compound composed of the elements carbon and oxygen, and whose chemical formula is CO2. Carbon dioxide is produced in the Earth’s atmosphere in a variety of ways. For example, animals, including humans, breathe in oxygen and exhale carbon dioxide. Burning fossil fuels also releases carbon dioxide into the air.This chart showing carbon dioxide levels is from Skeptical Science, a blog written by John Cook, a scholar working at the Global Change Institute at the University of Queensland, Australia. He takes his information from peer-reviewed scientific journals.It shows increases in CO2 levels. CO2 is the major greenhouse gas thought to cause global warming and climate change. The concentration of CO2 is increasing from decade to decade. According to a report in the journal Science, we would have to go back 15 million years to find levels as high as they are today.CO2 Levels Over the Last 10,000 Years
STUDENT MATERIALSSTUDENT MATERIALSS-15BIG HISTORY PROJECT / ASSESSMENTINVESTIGATION—THE MODERN REVOLUTIONAnalysis of texts in this InvestigationText NameLexile Measure1Common Core Stretch Grade Band22Mean Sentence LengthFlesch Ease3Population Trends10406–814.6751.1Urban Population Growth10006–814.5635.8Literacy and Education10306–815.0842.7Inventions and Discoveries8204–512.5058.7Vaccines and Disease9906–814.0940.3Spread of Democracy11206–818.4248.6Wars and Killings by Governments11306–817.8353.4CO2 Levels Over the Last 10,000 Years10806–914.751.21 Lexile measure indicates the reading demand of the text in terms of its semantic difficulty and syntactic complexity. The Lexile scale generally ranges from 200L to 1700L. The Common Core emphasizes the role of text complexity in evaluating student readiness for college and careers.2 We are using the Common Core “stretch” grade bands. The Common Core Standards advocate a “staircase” of increasing text complexity so that students “stretch” to read a certain proportion of texts from the next higher text complexity band.3 In the Flesch Reading Ease test, higher scores indicate that the material is relatively easy to read while lower scores indicate greater difficulty. Scores in the 50–70 range should be easily understood by 13- to 15-year-olds, while those in the 0–30 range are appropriate for university graduates.