Read the passage from how to live on twenty-four hours a day. hence, it seems to me, the first business of the day should be to put the mind through its paces. you look after your body, inside and out; you run grave danger in hacking hairs off your skin; you employ a whole army of individuals, from the milkman to the pig-killer, to enable you to bribe your stomach into decent behaviour. why not devote a little attention to the far more delicate machinery of the mind, especially as you will require no extraneous aid? it is for this portion of the art and craft of living that i have reserved the time from the moment of quitting your door to the moment of arriving at your office. the author’s main purpose is to convince readers to a. devote less time to worrying about what to eat. b. resist working too much in favor of taking up the arts. c. avoid endangering themselves just so they can look better. d. spend as much time developing the mind as developing the body.

The correct answer is D. Spend as much time developing the mind as developing the body.

Explanation:

The purpose of the author in a text is the main goal the author wants to achieve with the audience, common general purposes include to inform, to entertain, to persuade or to explain. Additionally, the author general purpose is usually linked to some idea or topic developed during the text. In the case of  the text presented the author first explains several actions people do to look after their body and after this the author questions this previous practices by using a rhetorical question that mainly ask the audience why they do all these actions for their bodies but not for the minds, which means the author is questioning the amount of time spent in developing the body and the little time in developing the mind and at the same time the author invites the audience to start spending time to develop and look after their minds.

This means the author main purpose is to convince the audience to " Spend as much time developing the mind as developing the body" as the author emphasizes in the time and actions people do for their body and the need to do as many actions for developing one's mind, also the author's words are a direct invitation to the audience to take action and look after their minds and not only their bodies, which mains the main goal is to persuade and this purpose is linked to the idea of developing the mind.

throughout history, economists have always thought  ..