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Complete PICLE corpus of essays by Polish advanced EFL students (330,000)

/^t/The tastes and conducts of thousands of people are dictated by the public fashion rules; it is not striking then that the selection and practice of physical activities by the interested follow suit. Nowadays, for a person to be universally considered attractive certain conditions must be met, one of them being a slim, agile and sexy figure. Unfortunately, in many cases the condition happens to be absolutely compulsory for an individual to be at all noticed and approved. Our times are hard for the short, the plump and the lame. Therefore, it is quite common that not only people who are but also those who suspect themselves to be in some respect deficient, will soon become obsessed with the idea of getting themselves immediately into shape by all the available means and at any cost. It is here that we find the majority of maniacs, whose whole sense of living is filled with the one wish to be slender and sexy. Fitness identified as the way of achieving that aim may then counterproductively contribute to a person's breakdown entailed by his or her unquenched ambition, simply because nature does not enable us all to be perfectly trim and shapely.