Cigarette smoking is a health hazard of sufficient importance in the United States. It was 50 years ago this month that America’

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问题     Cigarette smoking is a health hazard of sufficient importance in the United States. It was 50 years ago this month that America’s Surgeon General sounded that warning, marking the beginning of the end of cigarette manufacturing—and of smoking itself—as a respectable activity.
Some 20 million Americans have died from the habit since then. But advertising restrictions and smoking bans have had their effect: the proportion of American adults who smoke has dropped from 43% to 18%; smoking rates among teenagers are at a record low. In many other countries the trends are similar.
    The current Surgeon General, Boris Lushniak, marked the half-century with a report on January 17th, declaring smoking even deadlier than previously thought. He added diabetes, colorectal cancer and other ailments to the list of ills it causes, and promised end-game strategies to extinguish cigarettes altogether.
    New technologies such as e-cigarettes promise to deliver nicotine less riskily. E-cigarettes give users a hit of vapour infused with nicotine. In America, sales of the manufacturer, who is the fastest e-cigarettes-adopter, have jumped from nearly nothing five years ago to at least 1 billion in 2013.
    At first, it looked as if e-cigarettes might lure smokers from the big tobacco brands to startups such as NJOY. But tobacco companies have bigger war chests, more knowledge of smokers’ habits and better ties to distributors than the newcomers. Some experts reckon Americans will puff more e-cigarettes than normal ones within a decade, but tobacco folk are skeptical. E-cigarettes account for just 1% of America’s cigarette market. In Europe 7% of smokers had tried e-cigarettes by 2012 but only 1% kept them up.
    And no one knows what sort of restrictions regulators will eventually place on reduced risk products, including e-cigarettes. If these companies can manage the transition to less harmful smokes, and convince regulators to be sensible, the tobacco giants could keep up the sort of performance that has made their shares such a fine investment over the years. But some analysts are not so sure.
    Many tobacco firms are struggling to deliver the consistency of the earnings-per-share model we’ve seen in the past. If that persists, investors may fall out of love with the industry. A half-century after the Surgeon General’ s alarm, they, and hopeless smokers, are its last remaining friends.
It can be learned from Paragraph 1 that cigarette manufacturing in the United States

选项 A、was of sufficient importance.
B、was put forward by America’s Surgeon General.
C、began to go downhill.
D、used to be an honorable activity.

答案D

解析 推断题。根据题干关键词定位到第一段。该段第二句后半部分讲到“这是50年前的这个月美国卫生部部长发出的警告。这一警告标志着卷烟制造业…不再是一项让人尊敬的行为”,故D项“曾是一项令人尊敬的行为”与原文相符,为正确答案。A项“十分重要”是对首句的曲解,且第一段中并没有此信息,故排除。B项“由美国卫生部部长提出”和C项“开始走下坡路”与首段第二句内容不符,故排除。
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