Choking Out Smoking

Choking Out Smoking

Choking Out Smoking
Reading Level

	edHelper's suggested reading level:	grades 8 to 10
	Flesch-Kincaid grade level:	9.69

Vocabulary

	challenging words:		cigarettes, fashionable, beginning, all-out, banned, quitting, secondhand, buses, airline, result, lung, seek, public, cause, flights, once
	content words:		Civil War, Advisory Committee, Federal Cigarette Labeling, Advertising Act, Environmental Protection Agency, American Cancer Society, Great American Smokeout, Cancer Society

Print Choking Out Smoking

Print Choking Out Smoking (font options, pick words for additional puzzles, and more)

Quickly Print - PDF format

	Quickly Print: PDF (2 columns per page)
	Quickly Print: PDF (full page)

Quickly Print - HTML format

Quickly Print: HTML

Proofreading Activity

Print a proofreading activity

Feedback on Choking Out Smoking

Leave your feedback on Choking Out Smoking (use this link if you found an error in the story)

Choking Out Smoking
By Joyce Furstenau

¹     Smoking was once fashionable in America. It wasn't long ago that non-smoking passengers on airplanes and customers in restaurants had to breathe in clouds of someone else's smoke. The bad health effects of tobacco were not known back then. Tobacco was initially used in pipes, for chewing, and for snuff. Cigarettes didn't become popular until after the Civil War.

²     During the Civil War, cigarettes were given to soldiers with their rations. The first American tobacco company cigarette factory opened in 1864. It produced nearly twenty million cigarettes that year. As early as 1901, anti-cigarette activities were beginning, but it wasn't fast enough. The tobacco companies began an all-out campaign to promote smoking. They used advertisements to make smoking cigarettes seem fashionable. Movie stars promoted certain brands of cigarettes. Many tobacco companies aimed their ad campaigns at women or young people.

³     That changed in 1952 when Reader's Digest published an article titled "Cancer by the Carton." The article was about the dangers of smoking. The sale of cigarettes went down for the first time in twenty years as a result. In the 1960's, the Surgeon General's Advisory Committee on Smoking and Health released a report that said, "cigarette smoking is causally related to lung cancer in men." Five years later, Congress passed the Federal Cigarette Labeling and Advertising Act. It required the surgeon general's warnings on all cigarette packages. All broadcast advertising was banned in 1971. Smoking was banned in 1990 on all interstate buses and all airline flights within the U.S. that lasted six hours or less.

Paragraphs 4 to 5:
For the complete story with questions: click here for printable

Copyright © 2009 edHelper