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The sweet confection known as chocolate is consumed to the delight of millions world-wide every day. Few of those sweet-toothed

admin2010-05-26  62
问题     The sweet confection known as chocolate is consumed to the delight of millions world-wide every day. Few of those sweet-toothed nibblers fully appreciate the long process by which chocolate is brought to their mouths, however. With an illustrious history, the story of chocolate is a fascinating one, almost rivaling its taste for the attention of its fans.
    The dark treat’s life begins in the form of the dark, pulpy seeds of the cocoa tree, known as chocolate beans. The Mayans of Southern Mexico harvested these beans to produce a bitter drink, marking them as the first to consume chocolate.  The first westerner to encounter chocolate, however, was none other than Christopher Columbus, who discovered an abandoned canoe in the Americas containing various trading goods, including the aforementioned chocolate beans, on August 15, 1502.
    After Hernando Cortez encountered the Mayans and their curious drink, chocolate quickly became popular among the nobility in Europe, who sweetened it with sugar. In1882, chocolate pioneer Conrad J. Von Houten earned the distinction of being the inventor of solid chocolate when he pulverized the beans to create a powder, which could then be mixed to create a solid form. Von Houten’s innovation made chocolate even more popular, allowing it to spread to the masses, particular in England, which was more egalitarian than most other European nations.  Solid chocolate took off, never looking back, and has yet to slow down at all.
    The health implications of eating chocolate are varied, depending on which reports one chooses to read. In general, most of the negative press that chocolate has received over the years has been refuted. The claim that consuming chocolate produces acne has been disproved in recent years, and it has even been concluded in some studies that eating chocolate can contribute to preventing heart disease.
    As to why chocolate lovers seem so happy, science has provided some insight into that question as well. It has been determined that chocolate contains certain elements such as caffeine that increase the production of anandamides, the chemical produced by the body that makes us feel good. Further, other chemicals contained in chocolate have been proven to inhibit the breakdown of those anandamides, making the good feeling last longer.
Von Houten’ s contribution to the development of chocolate is important because it ______.
选项 A、produced chocolate in a form never seen before
B、increased the marketability of chocolate as a consumer good
C、improved the taste of chocolate
D、made chocolate available to more people, speeding its growth
答案D
解析
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