Sorting+Out

SORTING OUT 1 What information is relevant to our questions? 2What parts support out answers? 3How does it relate to what else we know? 4What parts do not support our answers? 5Does it raise new questions? 6What are we feeling about our inquiry at this phase? 7How have our feelings changed since the beginning of our research?

Answers:

1. What specific things nicotine does to you?. "When a person smokes, nicotine diffuses through the skin, lungs and mucous membranes and from there it travels to the blood vessels to be delivered to the rest of our body. It changes how your body and brain function by giving a you a relaxed and invigorated feeling. At the same time it releases adrenaline, which cause an increase in blood pressure, rapid heartbeat and shallow breathing.

Nicotine also blocks the release of your insulin hormone thus curbing your appetite so you eat less. It also increases your metabolic rate so you burn more calories than you usually would. This appears to be just fine because you're losing weight without exercising but smoking does not offer any benefits. In fact, it can increase the level of your bad cholesterol or "LDL" because it hardens your arteries and it's just a matter of time before you get a stroke heart attack. Prolonged use of this substance and the failure to kick the habit may cause death on nicotine addiction. Health problems associated with nicotine addiction include lung cancer, stroke, emphysema, heart problems and diabetes complications. Other effects of nicotine addiction are erectile dysfunction, Buerger's disease (acute inflammation of veins and arteries of the hands and feet). This is like gangrene and amputation might be the last resort.

2.how does smoking affects the family? "If you smoke, your children are more likely to start smoking when they are teens. You could be passing on your addiction to the next generation of your family. Children of smoking parents are twice as likely to smoke themselves than children who are raised in a healthier, non-smoking environment. One U.S. study found that 90 percent of American adults who smoke started by the time they were 18 years old. The earlier your children start smoking, the more time they have to be exposed to the disease-inducing chemicals in cigarettes and the more likely they are to suffer and perhaps die from smoking-related illnesses. You could also be influencing your partner. Perhaps he or she smokes too and is trying to give up - you're making it harder. Many women who restart smoking after having given up for a whole nine months during pregnancy say they started again because they had a partner who smokes.

The Emotional Effects You might be doing a good job of putting the dangers of cigarettes out of your mind but that doesn't mean your family isn't worrying about you. Children in particular receive a lot of anti-smoking education at school and you may not be aware of just how much they know. It's a fairly safe bet that your kids know smoking kills people and yet they have to watch Mom or Dad do something that dangerous every day. Can you even begin to imagine how traumatic that is for a small child? As far he or she is concerned, you know that smoking is dangerous and that it can cause you to get sick and die, which would mean that you wouldn't be around to look after them any more, and yet you are still putting cigarettes before them. If they are old enough to understand the situation, they probably feel very alone and afraid each time you light up. Aside from your kids, your partner might also be very worried about your health and the future. No one wants to manage on their own."

3. How smoking affect the environment?

It is fairly obvious that smoking pollutes the air and quite often the ground. However, it is not always obvious how or how much smoking pollutes. Cigarettes contain over 4000 chemicals which are exhaled and released into the air and the atmosphere. Approximately 30% of North Americans are smokers, and the percentage goes much higher in developing countries, which means there is a massive amount of pollution being released into the air every day. Trees are often compared to the lungs in our bodies because they perform basically the same functions as our lungs do on a global scale. With all of the pollutants that the trees filter out for us already it seems almost crazy to add more to the air that doesn’t need to be added. We need to breathe, but no one needs to smoke.

The pollution caused by cigarettes does not stop in our bodies or the air; it also affects the land we live on and the water that we drink. Millions of cigarette butts are discarded onto the ground every day. Every year in CaliforniaU the state has a statewide cleanup and cigarette butts account for almost half of the waste that is collected. These are only the ones that are picked up in one state and millions more are never picked up. They end up in the rivers and lakes where fish and animals eat them by mistake and quite often die from it. The rest are left on the ground to decompose which will take an average of 25 years while all of the chemicals and additives leach into the ground and pollute the soil and the plants. If you are going to smoke please consider this information before your throw your cigarette butts on the ground. It looks unattractive, it is a major fire hazard in dry weather, and it is extremely harmful to the environment.

Probably the most impacting aspect of cigarettes is actually producing them. There is the land used to grow the crops all over the world that could be put to better use by planting more trees or food for starving children in third world countries. These crops are also often sprayed with a lot of harmful pesticides and chemicals because tobacco is a very fragile plant and is likely to pick up disease. It also takes a lot of trees to produce and package cigarettes. Cigarette manufacturing uses four miles of paper an hour just for rolling and packaging cigarettes. One tree is wasted for every three hundred cigarettes produced. Those trees could be filtering out the pollutants already in the air instead of being chopped down for the cause of adding new ones. There is still the energy and water wasted in manufacturing cigarettes that needs to be considered and with soil depletion and chemical wastage added on top of that it becomes clear that manufacturing cigarettes has an enormous strain on the environment.

3. What information supports our answer