No one could have seen it at the time, but the invention of beet sugar was not just a challenge to cane. It was a hint-
just a glimpse, like a twist that comes about two thirds of
the way through a movie that the end of the Age of
Sugar was in sight. For beet sugar showed that in order to
create that perfect sweetness you did not need slaves, you
did not need plantations, in fact you did not even need
cane. Beet sugar was a foreshadowing of what we have
today: the Age of Science, in which sweetness is a product
of chemistry, not whips.
In 1854 only 11 percent of world sugar production came
from beets. By 1899 the percentage had risen to about 65
percent. And beet sugar was just the first challenge to
cane. By 1879 chemists discovered saccharine-a
laboratory-created substance that is several hundred
times sweeter than natural sugar. Today the sweeteners
used in the foods you eat may come from corn (high-
fructose corn syrup), from fruit (fructose), or directly from the lab (for example, aspartame, invented in 1965,
or sucralose-Splenda-created in 1976). Brazil is the
land that imported more Africans than any other to work
on sugar plantations, and in Brazil the soil is still perfect
for sugar. Cane grows in Brazil today, but not always for
sugar. Instead, cane is often used to create ethanol, much
as corn farmers in America now convert their harvest into
fuel.
-Sugar Changed the World,
Marc Aronson and Marina Budhos

In a well-structured paragraph, state the claim of the
previous passage and evaluate the effectiveness of the
evidence the authors present to support it.