a. The anthropometrics try to respond to the evaluation of living standards, which was a little bit difficult to explain by some more potential indicators such as the real wages, because on this one there were these two opposite views: pessimistspessimistic and optimistsoptimistic. Anthropometrics having the most common indicator as people’s height allowed us to understand better the evolution of standards of living by regarding the human body as a machine that needs fuel – food (proteins, carbohydrates, micronutrients) – tooto operate and grow. So, there’s a link between good nutrition and taller people, taller andand between diseases and starvation withand smaller people. So, by measuring thepeople's height, of people is measuringit is possible to measure how well they lived. For these reasons, average heights reflect a population’s evolution of net nutrition and atherefore the evolution therefore ofof the standards of living. The anthropometric evidence suggests that almost everywhere average heights decreased during the process of industrialization due to great amounts of work, diseases, and bad diets caused by the era of industrial revolution era. So, this supports thatthe idea that the fruits of the Industrial Revolution took a long time before being generally shared in the population - Pessimist view.