Read the text and make its summary. “People smoke not because they want to but because

“ People smoke not because they want to but because

they cannot stop” English psychologist M. Russet

Who smokes? The World Health Organization (WHO) has counted that there are more than 1.1 billion smokers in the world, of which about 47 percent are men and 12 percent are women. About 6000 billion cigarettes are smoked every year in the world. According to scientists, one third of adults smoke tobacco. For example, in the USA, about 46.4 million people smoke, and the population in 2000 was 281.4 million. In Russia, the numbers are still greater –70 million smokers. It is one of the highest levels in the world. In our country 70.5 percent of men, 30-47 percent of boys and 25-32 percent of girls are addicted to this “weed”. Twenty five billion cigarettes are smoked in our country every year! And – unlike the United States and Europe – in Russia, the rates are not descending, but rising.

People in urban areas are smoking more than those from the country, and the main population of smokers live in big cities (more than 100 thousand citizens are smoking).

Separated men and women are more addicted to tobacco than ones who are still together. Among married people, smokers are often from troubled families. It is also worth mentioning that in half of cases, wives are indifferent to whether their husband smokes or not, and only one third said that they are against smoking.

According to the WHO, in Asia, smoking is widespread among people with low socio-economical status.

Why do they smoke? There are several theories that try to explain the motive for smoking tobacco. As it`s said in the Royal London Medical College`s report: “Smoking tobacco is a form of becoming addicted to the substance. Not very different from other drugs”. Systematic smoking can be regarded as a result of a first “experiment” with a cigarette and falling into a habit of it after several more times.

Of course, smokers understand that systematic smoking can lead to various diseases, but do not feel that it can happen soon. Another thing is that they consider smoking to be calming, anti-stressful, relaxing, and easing; they use it to go to “another world” and avoid problems of the real life. Illusion 3 – smoking as a factor of independence and prestige.

Often childhood also has its effect when most people get into this habit. The school environment also plays a great role: teachers, sport trainers, – all of them smoke. Mass media, especially TV, cinema and enormous amounts of commercials and advertisements, badly affects kids, as well.

However, smoking can be viewed not as a habit but as an illness. When an empty packet of cigarettes or even an irritating phone call is enough to encourage a cigarette this is evidence of what is called “Syndrome of chronic smoking”.

What is bad about it? Tobacco contains more than 4, 000 chemical components, at least 40 of which may cause cancer. It also contains several hundred poisons, including nicotine, cyanide, arsenic, formaldehyde, carbonic acid, carbon oxide, prussic acid, etc.

There are even radioactive substances such as polonium, lead, and bismuth. A packet of cigarettes a day equals about 500 X-ray exposure a year! The temperature of a smouldering cigarette can be around 700-900C.

Nicotine is one of the strongest poisons known. After the tobacco smoke gets to the lungs, it takes only 7 seconds for nicotine to reach the brain. It makes many illnesses more severe. For example, atherosclerosis, hypertension, gastritis, etc. A fatal dose of nicotine for an adult is a packet smoked at once. For a teenager, only half a packet! It is said not without reason: “A drop of nicotine kills a horse”. Actually, a drop is enough to kill 3 horses!

However, the most dangerous of all the poisons in a cigarette is resin. People usually smoke because of the nicotine`s effect, but they usually die because of the effect of resin. When you smoke, resin gets inside your lungs and settles there in millions of small drops to the cubic centimetre. Resin causes paralysis of the cleansing process of lungs, reduces the effectiveness of the immune system, and causes cancer and lung problems.

Carbon oxide is a colourless gas that is contained in cigarettes in a high concentration and causes the lungs to reduce oxygen flow. It effects the functioning of all the tissues in the organism. The brain and muscles (including heart) cannot work to the full extent.

Hydrogen cyanide affects the bronchial tree, which is a part of the cleansing mechanism in the lungs. Other toxic agents of a cigarette that go to the lungs are ammonium, nitric dioxide and formaldehyde.

There are also highly concentrated radioactive components in cigarette smoke. For example, polonium-210 and potassium-40. Apart from these, there are also such radioactive components as radium-226, radium-228 and thorium-228, which are very dangerous carcinogens.

It is true that there are NO harmless cigarettes or harmless ways of smoking. The only way to reduce the danger is to give up.

Does smoking lead to death? It is proven that a package of cigarettes deprives a person of 400 minutes or 6 hours, 40 minutes of life. It means that an ordinary smoker loses 144 000 minutes or 32 days a year, having only eleven months instead of twelve left.

Smoking is a very serious factor of the high death-rate. Health authorities affirm that every second death of a smoker is because of illnesses caused by cigarettes, and if people in Russia stop smoking there will be 300 deaths a year less. However, if they go on as they are now, in 2040-2050, every 3 seconds one person will die as a result of smoking.

According to American Statistics, every year, 440 thousand people in the United States lose their lives because of diseases provoked by smoking. That is one fifth of all deaths. General damage of them to the country`s economy is valued at 150 billion dollars a year.

Experts of WHO (World Health Organization) say that if everything goes on the same way as now, about 500 million of living people – 9 percent of world` s population – will be killed by tobacco. Since 1950, smoking caused 62 million deaths, which is more than World War II. Smoking results in 6 percent of all deaths in the world and about 3% of global diseases. That is a serious problem.

The death-rate of smokers is three times as high as of no-smokers. Eighty five percent of lung cancer is caused by tobacco and 25 percent of all fatal illnesses are closely connected with smoking.

Purulent bronchitis, ischemic heart-disease, impotence, ulcers, gangrene, atherosclerosis, spasms of vessels, yellowish tinting of eyes, withering skin, premature aging, offensive breath, throat inflammation, and reddening of eyes are some side effects of smoking.

If you smoke and, even after you have read all the facts above, you do not realize what tobacco does to your body and health, nothing can help you. At best, your life will be 10-15 years shorter than it could. And you`ll be extremely lucky if you lose your life because of a sudden heart attack, but not in the terrible throes of lung cancer.

Passive smoking. Often people think that habits which affect people`s health including smoking – are their private problems. That`s not true. During the last few years more and more information about passive, or compulsory, smoking appears. This is described as inhaling the air polluted by cigarette smoke. It is said that passive smoking may cause the development of illnesses that are usual for smokers (see the table). This risk, as well as compulsory smoking and adaptation to cigarette smoke is obviously high.

During its short life, a lit cigarette is the source of side-smoke, which affects the people around the smoker, who have no chance but to breathe the harmful smoke.

It is easy to see from the table that a passive smoker, who is in the same room as an active one for eight hours, inhales a dose of various gaseous components that can be equated to smoking more than 5 cigarettes. For example, in side smoke there are 3.4 times as much bensapilene as in the main flow of smoke. Dimethyl-nitrosoamin is the most dangerous among several cancinogenic nitrosoamines contained in a cigarette. No kind of species can withstand its carcinogenic effect, which mostly affects the liver and lungs.

Passive smoking severely damages people`s health and actually leads to the same problems as an active way of smoking.

Smoking and youth. Nowadays the problem of teenage smoking has become a prevailing one. A quarter of Russian boys try their first cigarette before they are 10. About 28 percent of girls start smoking at the age of 13, which is a peak age for most children considering this area. The level of this bad habit among teenagers in Russian in 1999 was almost 40 percent for boys and 27.5 percent for girls. As time passes, the situation gets worse and worse. Lately, the numbers rose: 10.6 percent more for boys and 7.5 percent - for girls. Every third teenagers between the ages of 14-16 smokes systematically now. According to the WHO, in Great Britain the average age to start smoking for boys is 9.7, and for girls 11.2. In the USA – 12 years for both.

Most smoking youth (43%) say that the first time they tried a cigarette was motivated by a simple desire to try it. The direct influence of other teenagers was cited by 9 percent, and 20 percent say that their decision to smoke was their friends were smoking and they wanted to keep them company.

The dose of chemicals inhaled during active and passive smoking Inhaled dose, mg