People have been talking about health for a long time because people know the importance of it. People's understanding of health also becomes deeper with the progress in scientific research. Recently the term "health" has come to have a wider meaning than it used to. It no longer means just the absence of illness. Today, health means the well-being of your body, your mind and your relationship with other people. This new concept of health is closely related to another term - quality of life. Quality of life is the degree of overall satisfaction that a person gets from life. Why has the emphasis of health shifted from the absence of disease to a broader focu s on the quality of a person's life? One reason for this has to do with the length and conditions of life that people can now expect . Medical advances have made it possible for people today to live longer, healthier lives. Imagine for a moment that you were born in the year 1900. You could have expected on average to live until about the age of 47. In contrast , if you were born in the year 1999, you could expect to live to the age of 75. ===== question: The emphasis of health has shifted nowadays because people enjoy better conditions of living and they can live longer.