「普特聽力文摘」吸菸的害處你知道嗎

普特聽力是被公認的一種適合英語學習者的英語聽力材料，經常聽普特英語聽力，有助於學生的英語聽力提高。下面，小編為大家送上一篇普特聽力文摘，希望對大家有用。

普特聽力文摘：

People give all kinds of reasons for why they started smoking, but none of them are good — not even supposedly altruistic ones.

While some claim that you’re actually saving our overburdened healthcare system money in the long run by smoking because it reduces life expectancy, it’s nowhere near a watertight argument.

First of all, you’re certainly not doing your family and friends a favor by deliberately lowering your life expectancy. In fact, your family will have to absorb the losses incurred when you miss work due to smoking-related illnesses. Second, there is a lot of debate over the best way to measure the economic costs of smoking.

Every study is based on different assumptions, and uses different data and methods. For example, should you measure the cost of smoking by looking at the cost of treating major illnesses like lung cancer and heart disease, or should you also measure the cost of less serious illnesses? Should you take into account the fact that people who live longer also pay more taxes and insurance premiums? Should you look at the overall cost to the healthcare system, or at the cost per individual?

Anyway, regardless of how you calculate them, the economic costs of smoking are inconsequential when compared to smoking’s real price: the misery caused by the deaths of over 400,000 people each year and the illnesses of several million.

　參考譯文：

人們總是為開始抽菸找各種理由，但是沒有一種是好的，沒有所謂的利他理由。

有這樣一種聲音，從長遠利益來說你抽菸是在拯救我們不堪重負的醫療系統資金，減少預期壽命，但嚴密的論證我們尚未掌握。

首先，刻意降低你的預期壽命，並不是在幫你家人和朋友的忙。事實上，當你患上了抽菸的相關性疾病，你的家人便不得不承受造成的.損失。其二，通過最好的方式去衡量抽菸的經濟成本還存在很多爭議。

各項研究都基於不同的假設，而且使用了不同的資料和方法。例如，通過觀察治療如肺癌，心臟病等重大疾病的成本，你估量到抽菸的成本了嗎?你同時估量到不嚴重疾病的成本了嗎?你考慮到活得更加長久人同時需要付更多的稅費和保險的事實了嗎?你考慮過醫療系統的總成本嗎?或者是每個人的成本嗎?

總之，不管你怎樣計算，與抽菸實際代價相比，它的經濟成本便微不足道了，抽菸釀成了每年40萬人的死亡以及數百萬人患病的悲劇。