Knowledge Check: Coffee

1. What are the latitude boundaries of the Coffee Belt?

40 degrees North to 40 degrees SouthOnly the tropics, 23.5 North to 23.5 South15 degrees North to 15 degrees South25 degrees North to 30 degrees South

2. Why were English coffeehouses of the 1600s and 1700s nicknamed Penny Universities?

One penny, the price of a cup, bought you a seat in the day's debateThey sold a university degree to anyone who could pay one pennyParliament funded them with a one-penny tax on every cup of coffeeThey sold a penny cup only to enrolled students and their tutors

3. What does coffee's inelastic demand tell us about how people buy it?

Demand is purely seasonal, rising in winter and dropping off in summerDemand depends only on how much the brands advertise, not on the priceDemand barely changes with price, because people treat coffee as a necessityDemand drops sharply with any price increase, since coffee is a luxury to skip

4. The Arabic word qahwa, the root of the word coffee, originally meant what?

WaterBeanMorningWine

5. Which country grows the most coffee, about 38 percent of the world's supply?

BrazilVietnamEthiopiaColombia

6. Why did King Charles II try to ban coffeehouses in 1675, and what happened?

The owners refused to pay the Crown's excise duties on coffee, so he closed them and taxed the survivors out of businessHe called them places spreading scandalous reports against his government, and the ban was reversed in 11 days after public outcryHe wanted his subjects to switch from coffee to tea, and the ban stayed in force for the rest of his reign, until his death in 1685Physicians blamed the coffeehouses for spreading the plague through the city, and the ban stayed in place for a full year

7. In a typical commodity-coffee supply chain, about what share of the retail price reaches the farmer at the farm gate?

About 50 percentAbout 10 percentAbout 30 percentAbout 70 percent

8. The Ethiopian Buna ceremony's three rounds, abol, tona, and baraka, map onto what?

The three daily meals: breakfast at dawn, lunch at midday, and dinnerThe three price tiers a market sets: budget, mid-range, and premium beansA three-act narrative: rising action, development, and resolutionThree different coffee species, brewed in turn from strongest to lightest

9. By 2050, what could happen to much of today's coffee-growing land as the climate warms?

The suitable growing area will roughly doubleNothing measurable will change for the plantsAll of it will become unsuitable, ending the cropUp to half of it could become unsuitable for coffee

10. What was the Dutch Cultuurstelsel?

A forced-cultivation system in Java that made farmers grow export crops, including coffeeA famous Dutch coffeehouse in Amsterdam where merchants priced the cargoes arriving from JavaA fair-trade certification founded in Amsterdam that set a price floor for colonial coffeeA variety of Arabica coffee bred by Dutch planters on Java for the low, hot plantations

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