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  3. For smokers, the world is an increasingly hostile place. Driven out of bars and other public spaces, smokers are now to be found

For smokers, the world is an increasingly hostile place. Driven out of bars and other public spaces, smokers are now to be found

admin2012-08-05  45
问题     For smokers, the world is an increasingly hostile place. Driven out of bars and other public spaces, smokers are now to be found cowering (蜷缩) down cold and smelly alleyways. To add to their misery, each day seems to bring a new study showing how vile and dangerous the cigarette smoke can be. Could things get any worse? Possibly, if smokers were also knocked off their comfortable perch within popular culture. For in rich countries they can at least rely on films to portray their habit as somewhat more normal and prevalent than it actually is in the real world. Indeed, Hollywood has long been accused of glamorizing (美化) smoking.
    Research has identified links between smoking in films and the consumption of cigarettes by those leaving a cinema. What prompts such a response is unclear. But it is clearly relevant to those involved in public-health policy. Dylan Wagner and his colleagues at Dartmouth College, in New Hampshire, therefore decided to investigate the question.
    They put 34 people, half of them smokers, into a functional-magnetic-resonance imager to detect changes in the blood flow in the brain. Participants were asked to watch the first 30 minutes of Matchstick Men. When smokers viewed a scene that included smoking, they showed greater activity in those parts of the brain involved in perception and in the co-ordination of actions—the areas known to interpret and plan hand movements—as though they, too, were about to light a cigarette. This activity also corresponded to the hand that the volunteer used when smoking. Non-smokers showed no such enhancement. The part of the brain affected is the home of what is known as the mirror system. This induces, from mere observation, emotions and sensations similar to those induced by actual experience—for example, fear when a large spider is climbing the leg of an actor in a film. That it might provoke a desire to smoke is thus no surprise.
    Scott Heuttel, a neuroscientist at Duke University, in North Carolina, says that it has long been known that visual cues induce drug cravings, and that this study builds on a growing body of evidence showing that addiction may be reinforced not just by the drugs themselves but by images and other experiences associated with those drugs. Although smokers trying to quit are advised to avoid other smokers, and to remove smoking-related paraphernalia (用具) from their homes, it might not occur to them to avoid films in which smoking is depicted.
    No doubt, though, it will occur to society’s nannies (保姆) to remove the temptation altogether. Expect, on the basis of findings like this, a drive to purge films of characters who smoke. Unfortunately for smokers there is, as a gravelly voice-over might say in Hollywood, "No Place to Hide."
What might be an even worse thing for smokers according to the first paragraph?
选项 A、Being shut out from public places.
B、A new study showing the harm of smoking.
C、Having no popular culture to count on.
D、The extensive banning of smoking by the government.
答案C
解析 事实细节题。第一段主要描述吸烟者的生活现状：只能躲在小巷里偷着抽烟；越来越多的研究表明吸烟的可恨和危险。还有比这些更糟糕的是让他们脱离流行文化中的舒适环境。由此可见，对吸烟者来说更糟糕的事情可能是失去了可以依赖的流行文化环境，因此答案为C)。
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