AP WORLD HISTORY
Study Guide: Guns, Germs, and Steel
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The following strategy is suggested for completing this study guide:
1) Read the questions for the chapter before you start reading
2) Read the entire chapter without writing full answers
- Highlight, underline or flag with post-it notes, important sections as you discover them
3) Write your answers to the questions after you have read the entire section or chapter
- Most answers should be a few sentences long (Don’t write a book!)
Keep in mind that all of the answers to these questions are the theories of the book’s author, Jared
Diamond. Therefore, the words “According to Jared Diamond,” can be added to each question.
PROLOGUE:
1. What is “Yali’s Question”?
2. How does Diamond reword this question (which becomes the focal question of the entire book)?
3. Briefly describe the various possible answers to the question.
CHAPTER 1: Up to the Starting Line
* No questions but read this chapter quickly, focusing on the origins and spread of man
* Don’t get bogged down in all of the terminology like, Homo Sapien, Cro-Magnon, Clovis, etc.
CHAPTER 2: A Natural Experiment of History
4. Why did the Maori and the Moriori evolve differently?
5. How did population density affect economies, social complexity, and political organization?
CHAPTER 3: Collision at Cajamarca
6. Who are Atahualpa and Pizzarro and why was their meeting significant?
7. Explain the variety of reasons why Pizzarro’s small force defeated Atahualpa’s empire.
CHAPTER 4: Farmer Power
8. How did food production lead to Spanish advantages over the Inca?
CHAPTER 5: History’s Haves and Have-Nots
9. What are the 5 areas of independent domestication of plants (food production)?
10. What are the 4 areas that are possible sites of independent domestication of plants?
11. What 3-4 other areas received “founder packages” from Southwest Asia?
CHAPTER 6: To Farm or Not to Farm
12. Why did hunter-gatherers evolve to become farmers in some areas and not in others?
CHAPTER 7: How to Make an Almond
13. What does “plant domestication” mean?
14. Why is it important to understand when and why people became farmers?
15. What made some plants easier and more attractive to domesticate than others?
CHAPTER 8: Apples or Indians
16. Where is the fertile Crescent?
17. Why did its domesticated plants and animals give it such a head start over the rest of the world?
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CHAPTER 9: Zebras, Unhappy Marriages, and the Anna Karenina Principle
18. Why did Eurasia have the most domesticated animals of all continents?
19. What are the 6 characteristics of domesticated animals?
CHAPTER 10: Spacious Skies and Tilted Axes
20. Why is it significant that Eurasia is the only continent with an East/West axis?
21. What does this mean for continents with a North/South axis?
CHAPTER 11: Lethal Gift of Livestock
22. Following the arrival of European explorers in the New World, why did European diseases wipe-out
Native Americans and not the other way around (Native American diseases killing Euros)?
CHAPTER 12: Blueprints and Borrowed Letters
23. What do the following terms mean: “blueprint copying” and “idea diffusion”?
24. Why did kings want to limit writing to the elites?
CHAPTER 13: Necessity’s Mother
25. How does Diamond feel about the old adage, “Necessity is the mother of invention”?
26. What are the 4 factors that affect societal acceptance of an invention?
27. What are the 4 vehicles of diffusion (ways that ideas or items move) (top of page 256)?
28. Why did Japan lose gun technology?
29. Why did leading a sedentary lifestyle (living in one place) lead to an explosion of technology?
CHAPTER 14: From Egalitarianism to Kleptocracy
30. Summarize the differences between: bands, tribes, chiefdoms, and states.
31. What are 4 reasons why large populations require complex, centralized political organization?
CHAPTER 15: Yali’s People
* Skip reading this chapter altogether (Yeah!!!)
CHAPTER 16 : How China Became Chinese
* Skip reading this chapter altogether (Yeah!!!)
CHAPTER 17: Speedboat to Polynesia
* Skip reading this chapter altogether (Yeah!!!)
CHAPTER 18: Hemispheres Colliding
32. Why did Native American societies lag so far behind Eurasian societies in the areas of food production,
germs, technology, political organization, and writing?
33. Why did the diffusion of wheat from Mesopotamia prevent independent domestication elsewhere?
CHAPTER 19: How Africa Became Black
34. What were the 5 major human groups that dominated Africa by A.D. 1000?
35. How, when, and why did the Bantu come to dominate sub-Saharan Africa?
EPILOGUE: The Future of Human History as a Science
* Skip reading this chapter altogether (Yeah!!!)
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