AP U.S. History · Free-response skill

Short answer: name it, then explain it

The move. Answer each short-answer part directly: name a specific, accurate piece of evidence when asked to name, and give a clear cause or effect when asked to explain.

How to do it

  1. Read each part for its task word. Name and give ask for one specific thing; explain asks for the how or the why.
  2. Make named evidence specific: a named disease, people, law, system or event, not a general category. For example, write the Treaty of Tordesillas, not an agreement between two kingdoms.
  3. For an explain part, give the cause or effect in a full sentence, using because or so to make the link plain.
  4. Keep each answer to one or two full sentences and answer the parts in order. There is no thesis and no introduction in a short answer.
  5. Stay inside the time frame the question gives. Accurate evidence from the wrong century does not answer the part.

Practice prompt Try it

In the century after 1492, the Native population of the Caribbean islands and of central Mexico fell sharply. Spanish colonists, who had counted on Native people to work their mines, fields and ranches, faced a growing shortage of workers.

Read the passage. Then answer each part in one or two sentences.

  1. Name one disease, carried from Europe or Africa, that spread among Native peoples after 1492.
  2. Explain why diseases like this one killed a far larger share of Native people than of Europeans.
  3. Name the Spanish system that let a colonist demand work and goods from the Native people living in a given district.
  4. Name the new source of forced labor that Spanish colonists in the Caribbean turned to as Native workers died.

Write each part, then check yourself against the checklist. Nothing you type here is saved or graded.

Check yourself and see a model answer

Checklist

Our own checklist of what a full answer does, one line per point. Tick each one your response earns.

0 of 4 points

Model answer, annotated

(a) Smallpox spread among Native peoples after the Spanish arrived, striking the Caribbean islands and then the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan in 1520.

  • Point 1 Names a disease carried from the Eastern Hemisphere: smallpox.

(b) Native people had never been exposed to smallpox before 1492, so they had no immunity to it, while many Europeans had survived it in childhood and were resistant.

  • Point 2 States the reason: no earlier exposure and so no immunity among Native people.

(c) The system was the encomienda, which let a colonist demand labor and tribute from the Native people of an area.

  • Point 3 Names the system: the encomienda.

(d) As Native workers died, colonists turned more and more to the Atlantic slave trade, buying enslaved Africans to work on sugar plantations and in mines.

  • Point 4 States the response: colonists turned to enslaved Africans to replace Native workers.