RHONDA WEBB: Welcome to AP Daily--
Practice Session.
In today's session, we will be looking at the multiple choice
questions for AP US history.
If you want to try the questions before we go over the answers,
you can download them in the description below.
I'm Dr. Rhonda Webb.
And I live in Roswell, Georgia.
And I'll be here to help you figure out how you approach
multiple choice questions.
So let's look at a sample.
And the multiple choice questions
come in usually sets of three, where
you've got a passage of some sort or a stimulus of some sort
that the questions will relate to.
So we're going to look at three different questions related
to this one particular stimulus.
So if we look at this first question,
which of the following groups would have most opposed
the goals of the speech?
We need to make sure that we understand what the speech is
and what it says.
So we've got some options here--
British settlers, French fur traders, the king of France,
and religious missionaries.
I always tell my students, before you
start trying to answer that question,
you need to start at the very bottom of the passage
and look at the source information.
So in this particular example, we have Ateawanto,
I believe that's how you pronounce his name.
He's an Abenaki Indian leader.
And he is giving a speech.
So we notice that this is what type of source
it is and we know who is the author of the speech.
It is going to be delivered to, and so here's
the audience, the royal governor of Massachusetts.
They're at a treaty conference.
This gives us a hint as to what they're meeting about.
And we know that the time period is 1752.
There are other people present.
We've got the Iroquois Indian chief who is there.
The French and the English they're all in attendance.
So let's look at what this says before we start
to try to answer the question.
So this is what the Abenaki Indian leader is saying.
"Brothers, we tell you that we seek not war,
we ask nothing better than to be quiet,
and it depends, Brothers only, on you English,
to have peace with us.
We have not sold the lands we inhabit,
and we wish to keep possession of them.
Our elders have been willing to tolerate you, brothers
Englishmen, on the seaboard.
But we will not cede 1 inch of land
that we inhabit beyond what has been decided formally
by our father."
So they're saying here, we're not giving up any of our land
because this was what was agreed to previously.
Then he goes on.
"The governor of French Canada who is here present
has nothing to do with what we say to you.
We speak to you of our own accord,
and in the name of our allies we are entirely free.
We are allies of the King of France,
for whom we have received the faith
and all sorts of assistance in our necessities.
We love that monarch, and we are strongly
attached to his interest."
So notice that he's saying we are more
aligned with the French.
The problem that we have is with you the English.
So now let's go back to our question.
Which of the following groups would have most opposed
the goals of the speech?
So what's it asking us to do here?
We're trying to figure out the audience.
So which audience group would have not
liked what he has to say?
So we need to think about the goals.
So what were the goals of this Indian leader?
Well, it's right here.
He wants to keep his land.
So who wouldn't have liked that idea?
So what I tell students is to always try
to look at multiple choice as if it's true or false.
You can evaluate each answer choice and say true or false.
Would this group have been opposed
to the goals of this speech?
True or false.
So let's try that out.
True or false?
Would the British settlers been--
would they have been opposed to the natives
not giving up their land?
That's a possibility.
But I'm not going to stop there.
Even if I believe that answer choice would be sufficient,
I'm going to keep practicing my true/false evaluation
of each answer choice.
What about the French fur traders,
would they have been opposed to what
the Abenaki leader is saying?
I don't think so because he's aligned with the French.
He's making it very clear that they're in line with what
the French have to say.
Certainly, the King of France would not
be opposed to this because he is very clearly their favorite.
And then the religious missionaries.
This is not necessarily something
that would be in opposition to the natives giving up
their land.
So if I go back to the original question,
I would agree with our first instinct
that the British settlers would be the ones opposed to this.
So let's check ourselves.
And we're correct.
So then the next question is with the same passage.
We're not going to read it again.
We're just going to evaluate the question and our answer choices
in the same manner that we did before by turning it
into multiple--
I mean, turning the multiple choice into true or false.
Which of the following was the main purpose
of Ateawanto's speech?
So we talked about purpose before.
So here are our answer choices that we're going to evaluate.
And just to remind you, our answer choice,
our idea about purpose, was here about not giving up any land.
So which of these answer choices is going to align with that?
So true or false?
Would establishing commerce between Ateawanto's people
and the English be his purpose?
Absolutely not.
He's saying we're not interested in giving up our land
or he's not trying to secure trade.
It's his purpose to form an alliance between his people
and the French.
Now, this is where you need to be careful
because he does talk about an alliance with the French,
but is that his purpose in this particular passage?
The answer would be no.
Even though he alludes to the alliance with the French,
his purpose here is to protect their land.
What about seek?
To seek his people's freedom from French oppression.
Does he indicate that he's being oppressed by the French?
No, he's saying that they're allies.
So that's not his purpose.
Then what about D, to protect his people's land
from English colonizers.
Absolutely.
That is the purpose that we had identified
in the very beginning.
And we're correct.
So then in the final question set that--
our final question that goes with this set,
let's look what the question is asking.
It's asking us about contextualisation.
What else is going on in this time period
that the passage would have been written
that could have influenced the purpose of what's
happening here?
So look at the question.
The speech and the excerpt was delivered in which
of the following historical situations
during the mid-1700s?
So that's the time period that we had indicated, the 1750s.
What do we know is happening in the 1750s
before we start looking at these answer choices?
If I think back to some of those milestone dates
that we want to remember, this is right before the French
and Indian War where we know that the British and the French
were fighting over control of land in North America.
So if we're looking at the historical situation
during the mid-1700s that this would have been part of,
let's see if we can identify one of those possibilities here.
So for A, true or false?
Was the historical situation the use of Native American laborers
implantation agriculture?
The answer to that would be no.
So an historical situation, in this time period
they're not using the Native American laborers.
And so again, here if we're thinking about what's going on.
He's saying we're aligning ourselves with the French,
and that's going to be part of that conflict that leads us
into the French and Indian War.
So that's something that we're looking
for, not this idea of Native American workers in Plantation
agriculture.
B, true or false?
Was this during the time period of attempts
by the French settlers to acquire Native American land?
Well, there weren't many French settlers.
We had more French traders but not necessarily large numbers
of settlers who were coming in, making communities other than
in and around Quebec.
So that would not be true.
True or false?
Was this during competition between European empires
for Native American allies?
That's a possibility.
So let's go ahead and finish our true/false
and make sure that we've not misread anything.
True or false?
Was this written during the founding
of the first British colonies in Native American territory?
Now, we need to think about this.
The first British colonies in Native American territory,
that first colony was at Jamestown,
and that was in 1607.
So we are way off in our time period
here because we're more than 100 years removed.
But I need to think about that.
If I wasn't really sure, I would need
to consider and go back to my mid-- to my original question
where it says mid-1700s.
So we can eliminate that answer choice
because we know that that's not right
where Jamestown was the original settlement much earlier.
So then we come back to was this during a time of competition
between the European empires?
It was.
So let's check our answer.
And we're right again.
So we have three questions all related to this one passage.
So when you're using these strategies, when you're
evaluating your multiple choice options on the AP exam,
here's what I want you to think about.
I want you to make sure that you go back
through that source information in the stimulus
before you do anything else.
Then the next thing I want you to do,
think about any historical reasoning skills
that it's asking you to use.
We saw historical situation or contextualization.
Those are some of the terms that you're
going to see in your essay writing as well.
And sometimes they'll crop up here in multiple choices.
Well, you might see something about cause,
you might see intended audience, that's
something that-- and purpose, those
are things that you're doing when
you're looking at documents for a DBQ, for example.
You're going to be doing those same skills here
in multiple choice.
So just recognize what the question is asking you to do.
Then I want you to eliminate your answer choices.
Carefully evaluate all of them.
And it can help you to turn them into true or false,
and make sure that you slow yourself down,
that you're not looking for an answer
because if you're just looking for something
there may be some wording in there that will cause
you to make a careless mistake.
So here we go.
We're ready to continue with our reviews.
In our next episode, you'll be looking at a different aspect
of the AP US history exam.
I hope this has been helpful.
And until next time, keep reading and go make history.