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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  55
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 can we know about Dylan Wagner and his colleagues’ investigation from the third paragraph?
选项 A、Over 30 smokers had the brain blood flow detected.
B、The participants were asked to watch the whole film.
C、Some areas in smoker’s brain were more active at the smoking scene.
D、Non-smokers showed the same response as smokers in their brain.
答案C
解析 事实细节题。第三段主要介绍研究过程和结果。文中提到，利用功能性核磁共振成像检测被试验者在观看吸烟镜头时候的大脑中的血流量变化，研究人员发现吸烟者们大脑中与感知和协调行为相关的某些部位显示出较强的活跃性，而不吸烟者的大脑中并没有这样的强化反应，因此答案为C)。
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