Номер 4, страница 53 - гдз по английскому языку 8 класс учебник Вербицкая, Маккинли

Unit six.

Track forty-six.

Was Fred Flintstone a vegetarian?

Some anthropologists now think that for millions of years man's diet was more than eighty percent vegetarian. Alan Vicker investigates.

Twenty-four million years ago, when our ancestors lived in the tropical forests of Central Africa, they probably ate plants and fruit, and from time to time a few insects. When these prehistoric people started to travel north into the Savannah, their diet changed too, and they began to eat a lot of seeds and other plant material. And this is probably how man lived for the next twenty-two million years, eating roots, seeds, fruit, nuts, vegetables, and occasionally a little meat. How do we know? One important clue is our teeth. Just like animals which eat plants, humans have teeth called molars. These are the large flat teeth at the back of our mouths, which we need to break down hard food such as seeds.

Archaeologists can also tell us about diets of the past. In fact, we know a lot about the human diet over the last seven thousand years.

The Aztecs and Incas ate a lot of cereals, beans, and fruit, and not much meat at all. In classical India, most people didn't eat meat, and the Japanese were mainly vegetarian until a few generations ago. The main food of the slaves who built the pyramids was boiled onions.

Even today, some societies whose lifestyles are unchanged, like the Aborigines of Western Australia, are still mostly vegetarian.

During the nineteenth century, people in Western countries suddenly began to eat a lot more meat. New methods of keeping and killing animals, better transport and new inventions like fridges and freezers, helped to reduce the price of meat for ordinary people. It was probably at this time that the typical Western meal that millions of people eat every day, meat, potatoes, and vegetables, was born.

Also during the nineteenth century, the vegetarian movement started in Europe and the USA. But it was only in the nineteen sixties that more and more people in the West decided to give up meat in their diets. So why do people choose to be vegetarian? Many people decide to become vegetarian for personal reasons. First of all, some people think that it is healthier not to eat meat. Others believe that it's cruel to eat animals. The Irish writer, George Bernard Shaw once said, "Animals are my friends, and I don't eat my friends." Finally, there are some people who think that growing food for cows and pigs to eat is not very economical. Today, vegetarianism is more and more popular in Europe and the USA. But in most countries, people who never eat meat are still a very small minority.