The Adobe Acrobat Reader download is just an installer. This installer will lead to a much larger download that includes the Reader as well as the Yahoo! Toolbar and Adobe Photoshop Album Starter Edition. These items will download, however, upon installation you can opt-out of them.

The installer stub will force you to download unwanted toolbars and programs. Plus, it also installs Adobe Download Manager (ADM), which I do not want or need. Worse, ADM has a critical security hole, which even Adobe admits to.
Fortunately, the folks over at The Software Patch have figured out the latest direct FTP link to the Reader download:
http://www.softwarepatch.com/graphics/acrobatreader7.html
As I write this, the link is:
ftp://ftp.adobe.com/pub/adobe/reader/win/8.x/8.1.2/enu/AdbeRdr812_en_US.exe
If you obtain Adobe Reader via this link, you won't have to install ADM or other useless stuff. But this link will become outdated when there is a new version, so check back at The Software Patch for the latest. BTW, they host many other patches, upgrades, service packs and hardware drivers too.