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  3. For years, smokers have been exhorted to take the initiative and quit: use a nicotine patch, chew nicotine gum, take a prescript

For years, smokers have been exhorted to take the initiative and quit: use a nicotine patch, chew nicotine gum, take a prescript

admin2011-03-11  4
问题     For years, smokers have been exhorted to take the initiative and quit: use a nicotine patch, chew nicotine gum, take a prescription medication that can help, call a help line, just say no. But a new study finds that stopping is seldom an individual decision. Smokers tend to quit in groups, the study finds, which means smoking cessation programs should work best if they focus on groups rather than individuals. It also means that people may help many more than just themselves by quitting: quitting can have a ripple effect prompting an entire social network to break the habit.
    The study, by Dr. Nicholas Christakis of Harvard Medical School and James Fowler of the University of California, San Diego, followed thousands of smokers and nonsmokers for 32 years, from 1971 until 2003, studying them as part of a large network of relatives, co-workers, neighbors, friends and friends of friends.
    It was a time when the percentage of adult smokers in the United States fell to 21 percent from 45 percent. As the investigators watched the smokers and their social networks, they saw what they said was a striking effect—smokers had formed little social clusters and, as the years went by, entire clusters of smokers were stopping en masse.  So were clusters of clusters that were only loosely connected. Dr. Christakis described watching the vanishing clusters as like lying on your back in a field, looking up at stars that were burning out. "It’s not like one little star turning off at a time," he said,"Whole constellations are blinking off at once. "
    As cluster after cluster of smokers disappeared, those that remained were pushed to the margins of society, isolated, with fewer friends, fewer social connections. "Smokers used to be the center of the party," Dr. Fowler said, "but now they’ve become wallflowers." "We’ve known smoking was bad for your physical health," he said,"But this shows it also is bad for your social health. Smokers are likely to drive friends away. "
    "There is an essential public health message," said Richard Suzman, director of the office of behavioral and social research at the National Institute on Aging,  which financed the study. "Obviously, people have to take responsibility for their behavior," Mr. Suzman said. "But a social environment," he added, "can just overpower free will. " With smoking, that can be a good thing, researchers noted.  But there also is a sad side. As Dr. Steven Sehroeder of the University of California, San Francisco, pointed out in an editorial accompanying the paper, "a risk of the marginalization of smoking is that it further isolates the group of people with the highest rate of smoking—persons with mental illness, problems with substance abuse, or both. "
The word "en masse" (Line 4, Paragraph 3) most probably means______.
选项 A、at large
B、all together
C、in the end
D、respectively
答案B
解析 此题考查根据语境判断生词的含义。en masse是超纲词汇，对它的理解依赖上下文的线索。从宏观线索来看，第一段已经说明研究发现“吸烟者往往在群体中戒烟”，这也是贯穿全文的议题；第二段阐述了该研究的背景；第三段以研究者的口吻阐述他们的“惊人发现”：整群的吸烟者在……地戒烟；这一发现与第一段的“研究发现”是同一内容。因此en masse这个状语成分应该能体现出“群体戒烟”的含义。从微观线索来看，本段中的比喻whole constellations are blinking off at once(整个星群突然熄灭)也印证了“整个群落全体戒烟”的情形。综合考虑这些宏观和微观的线索，因此可以判断B选项正确。
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