Unit 2 No smoking, Please!

扩展资料

Tobacco

　　You most likely know that tobacco is a plant. It has large leaves that have been smoked in many forms for at least 2,000 years. But do you know that:

　　Before the twentieth century, not many people died from using tobacco because there wasn't much tobacco being used. Cigarettes had to be rolled by hand. A person who was really fast could roll about four cigarettes a minute, or around 2,000 a day. In 1884 the cigarette manufacturing machine was invented that could produce 120,000 cigarettes a day. Soon the number being sold rose to one billion a year. As a result of advertising and efficient machines, the tobacco business continued to grow. Today about 840 packs of cigarettes are sold every second in the U.S. That's more than one million every hour! Imagine that! Blink your eyes and 840 packs are sold. Blink again...another 840 packs! As the number of cigarette sales increased, so did the number of deaths caused by cigarettes. Today one out of every five people who die in the US dies because of smoking. Smoking tobacco is responsible for more deaths than cocaine, heroin, alcohol, fire, automobile accidents, homicides, suicides, and AIDS combined That amounts to about 430,000 people who die needlessly every year..1,200 people who die every day.... because of their addiction to cigarettes. It's like having several completely full jumbo jets crash every day, killing all aboard! (John Slade, M.D. from the Nicotine Challenger, Spring 1993)

Tobacco Facts

• Every eight seconds someone in the world dies from a tobacco related illness/disease.
• Smoking is the #1 preventable cause of premature death in the United States.
• On average, smokers die nearly seven years earlier than nonsmokers. Smoking is responsible for one out of five American deaths.
• In the U.S., smoking kills more people than cocaine, heoine, alcohol, fire automobile accidents, homicideds, suicides,a nd AIDS combined.
• Reports of the Surgeon General conclude that smoking cigarettes causes heart disease, lung and esophageal cancer, and chronic lung disease. Cigarette smoking contributes to cancer of the bladder, pancreas, and kidney. Consequences of using smokeless tobacco include cancer of the gum, mouth, pharynx, larynx, and esophagus.
• Men who smoke increase their risk of death from lung cancer by more than 22 times and from bronchitis and emphysema by nearly 10 times. Women who smoke increase their risk of dying from lung cancer by nearly 12 times and the risk of dying from bronchitis and emphysema by more than 10 times. Smoking tiples the risk of dying from heart disease among middle-aged men and women.
• About 10 million people in the United States have died from causes attributed to smoking (including heart disease, emphysema, and other respiratory disease) since the first Surgeon General's report on smoking and health in 1964--2 million of these deaths were the result of lung cancer alone.
• 90% of adult smokers are addicted to tobacco before they reach the age of 18; 50% before the age of 14; currently the average age of initiation to tobacco is age 11.
• 48 million adults smoke in the U.S. (22.9% of the population, overall) 33%of youth currently smoke.
• According to the CDC survey, there are 1,136,900 smokers in New Jersey (19.5% of the state population). 38% of youths in grades 9-12 smoke in New Jersey.

Who in USA Smoke

    Cigarette smoking is a widespread habit in the United States today. About forty-three percent of the adult men and thirty-one percent of the adult women smoke regularly. It is quite encouraging to note, however, that millions of people have given up the smoking habit. Seventy-five percent of the male population and forty-six percent of the female population have smoked cigarettes at some time during their lives, but twenty-six percent of these men and eleven percent of these women have stopped smoking. The number of persons who have given up smoking is increasing.
　　Men as a group smoke more than women. Among both men and women the age group with the highest proportion(比例) of smokers is the age group 24-44.
　　Income, education and occupation (职业) play a part in determining a person’s smoking habits. City people smoke more than people living on farms. Well-educated men with high incomes are less likely to smoke cigarettes than men with fewer years of schooling and lower incomes. On the other hand, if a well-educated man with a higher income smokes at all, he is likely to smoke more packs of cigarettes every day.
　　The situation is somewhat different for women. There are slightly more smokers among women with higher family incomes and higher education than among the lower income and lower educational groups. These more highly educated women tend to smoke more heavily.
　　 Among teenagers(青少年) the picture is similar. There are fewer teenage smokers from upper-income, well-educated families, and from families living in farm areas. High school students who are preparing for college are less likely to smoke than those who do not plan to continue their education after high school. Children are most likely to start smoking if one or both of their parents smoke.