Hãy tham khảo IELTS Academic Reading Sample 103 - An Era of Abundance được chia sẻ dưới đây để giúp các bạn biết thêm cấu trúc đề thi như thế nào, rèn luyện kỹ năng giải bài tập và có thêm tư liệu tham khảo chuẩn bị cho kì thi sắp tới đạt điểm tốt hơn. | An Era of Abundance Our knowledge of the complex pathways underlying digestive processes is rapidly expanding although there is still a great deal we do not fully understand. On the one hand digestion like any other major human biological system is astonishing in its intricacy and cleverness. Our bodies manage to extract the complex resources needed to survive despite sharply varying conditions while at the same time filtering out a multiplicity of toxins. On the other hand our bodies evolved in a very different era. Our digestive processes in particular are optimized for a situation that is dramatically dissimilar to the one we find ourselves in. For most of our biological heritage there was a high likelihood that the next foraging or hunting season and for a brief relatively recent period the next planting season might be catastrophically lean. So it made sense for our bodies to hold on to every possible calorie. Today this biological strategy is extremely counterproductive. Our outdated metabolic programming underlies our contemporary epidemic of obesity and fuels pathological processes of degenerative disease such as coronary artery disease and type II diabetes. Up until recently on an evolutionary time scale it was not in the int erest of the species for old people like myself I was born in 1948 to use up the limited resources of the clan. Evolution favored a short life span life expectancy was 37 years only two centuries ago so these restricted reserves could be devoted to the young those caring for them and laborers strong enough to perform intense physical work. We now live in an era of great material abundance. Most work requires mental effort rather than physical exertion. A century ago 30 percent of the . work fo rce worked on farms with another 30 percent deployed in factories. Both of these figures are now under 3 percent. The significant majority of today s job categories ranging from airline flight attendant to web designer simply didn t exist a
