TOEFL iBT Practice Test 32

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Long before chocolate became the sweet confection familiar today, Mesoamerican civilisations including the Maya and later the Aztecs consumed cacao primarily as a bitter, spiced beverage, often mixed with chili, cornmeal, or other flavourings rather than sugar, and cacao beans additionally functioned as a form of currency and held significant ceremonial and religious importance, sometimes appearing in elite burial offerings and ritual contexts. When Spanish colonisers encountered cacao in the sixteenth century, they gradually adapted the drink for European tastes, adding sugar and, later, ingredients such as cinnamon and vanilla, and for over a century chocolate remained an expensive, fashionable beverage largely confined to European aristocratic and wealthy merchant circles, since cacao had to be imported from colonial plantations and processed through slow, labour-intensive manual methods. The transformation into solid, eatable chocolate did not occur until the nineteenth century, driven by a sequence of technical innovations: a Dutch chemist developed a process to extract much of the bitter fat from cacao beans and produce a fine powder, and later British and Swiss confectioners experimented with recombining that fat with sugar and cacao solids to create the smooth, moldable solid bars recognisable today. Industrial-scale production, combined with falling sugar prices following the mechanisation of sugar refining, transformed chocolate from an elite luxury into a mass-market product, though this same industrial expansion also relied heavily on cacao plantations in West Africa, where labour conditions, including documented instances of child labour, remain a significant ethical concern in the chocolate industry today.