What the exam asks
- Multiple Choice (Section I, Part A): Stimulus sets using 20th- and 21st-century charts (life expectancy, carbon emissions, grain yields) or texts, asking you to explain a pattern of continuity or change or connect modern globalization to earlier eras (Skill 5: Making Connections).
- Document-Based Question (Section II, Question 1): Prompts covering up to 2001 where you can earn the complexity point by explaining relevant, insightful connections across periods or geographical areas, or by qualifying your argument with diverse evidence.
- Long Essay Question (Section II, Question 2): A single required broad prompt spanning roughly half the course (such as c. 1750 to 2001). Because you choose which examples and sub-periods to analyze, weighing the relative historical significance of changes against deep continuities is one strong route to the complexity point, the last of the six rubric points.
Core ideas
Science and technology after 1900: Continuity vs. Change
College Board’s course description (the CED) asks you to evaluate the extent to which science and technology brought change from 1900 to the present across five key sectors, while recognizing what remained continuous.
| Sector | Major Changes (1900–Present) | Underlying Continuities |
|---|---|---|
| Communication & Transportation | Radio, cellular networks, the internet, commercial air travel, and shipping containerization virtually eliminated geographic distance. | Global trade still relied on strategic maritime chokepoints (Suez, Panama, Malacca) and core-periphery economic hierarchies established in 1450–1900. |
| Energy | Petroleum, natural gas, and nuclear power vastly expanded industrial output and personal mobility, accelerating anthropogenic climate change. | Heavy reliance on finite, non-renewable fossil fuels (continuing the coal-driven model begun in the First Industrial Revolution c. 1750). |
| Agriculture | The Green Revolution (chemically engineered fertilizers, pesticides, and high-yield crossbred seeds like Norman Borlaug’s dwarf wheat) prevented mass famine in Mexico, India, and Pakistan. | Consolidation of land into large commercial agribusinesses displaced smallholder farmers, continuing a pattern of rural-to-urban migration seen since 1750. |
| Medicine | Antibiotics (penicillin), vaccines (polio, smallpox eradication), and artificial birth control sharply lowered mortality, increased life expectancy, and altered family structures and gender roles. | Persistent global health disparities: poverty-associated diseases (malaria, tuberculosis, cholera) continued to disproportionately affect low-income regions. |