The Age of Discovery

Unit Review Sheet

Facts and Definitions

Lesson 1: Why Was There an Age of Discovery?

• The voyages that began in 1492 took place due to several different events, discoveries, and trends that had begun decades earlier.
• Contact between Europeans and the peoples of the Americas irrevocably changed the lives of people on both sides of the Atlantic.
• European explorers ventured away from home for a variety of reasons — national competition, the quest for wealth, the desire for honor and glory, a hope of achieving religious conversions, and the search for new knowledge.

Lesson 2: New World Empires

• Farmers in the Americas had domesticated many plants for food, the most important being corn.
• The Inca empire covered thousands of miles of territory.
• The Aztec city of Tenochtitlán was larger than any European city of the time.
• The city of Cahokia in North America had, at one point, over 15,000 inhabitants.

Lesson 3: European Explorers

• Between 1492 and 1586, numerous voyages of exploration set forth from Europe toward the Americas.
• A sailor aboard one of Columbus's ships sighted land on October 12, 1492, after over a month at sea.
• After news of the successful voyage of Columbus spread, many Europeans were eager to learn more about this "new" world, to claim lands for their monarchs, and, many hoped, to find vast stores of gold.

Lesson 4: The Consequences of Contact

• Contact between Europeans and Americans created dramatic changes for people on both sides of the Atlantic.
• It is possible that as many as 9 out of 10 people living in the Americas before European contact may have died as a result of disease, hunger, war, or mistreatment after contact.
• The exchange of plants, animals, wealth, and ideas between Europe and the Americas had a far-reaching impact, even changing trade relationships with North Africa and Asia.

Lesson 5: Copernicus and Changes in Science

• The Scientific Revolution is the name given to the advances in scientific thinking that took place in the 16th and 17th centuries as people's understanding of how the world works moved away from medieval models of religious doctrine or deep thinking on a problem and toward new ways of thinking based on the scientific method.
• The scientific method, developed during the Renaissance, calls for observation, prediction, experimentation, and measurement.
• Copernicus found that we live in a heliocentric (sun-centered) system in which the Earth and other planets orbit around a stationary sun, an idea that was rejected by religious leaders at the time.

Lesson 6: Galileo

• Galileo Galilei (1564-1642) was an Italian scholar who confirmed the Copernican view of the universe with his own observations and calculations.
• Galileo was accused of heresy and put on trial in 1633.

Lesson 7: Isaac Newton

• Isaac Newton (1644-1727) is well known for his discoveries in the areas of calculus, light theory, wave theory, the physical laws of motion, gravity, and astronomy.
• Newton's Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica is regarded as one of the most influential works in modern science.
• The Enlightenment was a late 17th and 18th century European intellectual movement that focused on reason and the individual. It was influenced by some of the ideas emerging from the Scientific Revolution.

Final Project: Discovery Research Project

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