Readers of a certain age can remember a time when a trip to McDonald’s seemed like a treat and when a small bag of French fries,

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问题     Readers of a certain age can remember a time when a trip to McDonald’s seemed like a treat and when a small bag of French fries, a plain burger and a 12-ounce Coke seemed like a full meal. Fast food wasn’t any healthier back then; we simply ate a lot less of it. How did today’s oversized appetites become the norm? It was largely the result of consumer manipulation.
    Fast food’s marketing strategies succeed only when they induce a substantial number of us to overeat. Fast food restaurants, 20 years ago, figured out that they were sustained largely by a core group of "heavy users", mostly young, single males, who ate at fast-food joints as often as 20 times a month. Soon the race was on to capture a bigger share of these customers by streamlining food production and lowering prices.
    It worked and if the marketing strategy had stopped there, we might not be the nation of fatties that we are today, but the imperatives of the marketplace are growth and rising profits, and once everybody had slashed prices to the bone, the franchises had to look for a new way to satisfy investors. And what they found was ... super-sizing.
    Portion sizes had already been creeping upward. As early as 1972, for example, McDonald’s introduced its large-size fries. Here’s how it works. Let’s say a $1.25 bag of French fries costs $1 to produce. The potatoes, oil and salt account for only 20 cents of the cost. The other 80 cents goes toward all the other expenses. If you add half again as many French fries to the bag and sell it for $1.50, the non-food expenses stay pretty much constant, while the extra food costs the franchise only 10 more pennies. The fast-food joint makes an extra 15 cents in pure profit, and the customer thinks he’s getting a good deal.
The term "heavy user" used in the text refers mainly to______.

选项 A、overweight eaters
B、people who are willing to spend the most money on fast food
C、people who frequently ate at a fast food restaurant
D、people who would order larger orders at a time

答案C

解析 属概念理解题。可以利用第二段heavy users之后的定语从句对其含义作出判断。
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