Hello, hello, hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds by Leonardo English,
the show where you can listen to fascinating stories
and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
I'm Alistair Budge, and today we are going to be talking about the history of smoking.
Now, people have smoked all sorts of things for thousands of years, but nothing has ever been more popular than tobacco.
Tobacco, and cigarettes in particular, have a fascinating but sordid history.
We've known about the dangers of smoking for decades, perhaps even centuries.
And yet, smoking has long been marketed as something glamorous, cool and aspirational.
So, today we are going to look at the early history of tobacco, why people started smoking in the first place,
how it became one of the world's largest industries, and what the future of smoking might look like.
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Now, depending on where and when you grew up, one of the smells
that is probably most recognizable and familiar to you is the smell of cigarette smoke.
If you are over 30, you doubtless saw many people smoking indoors,
and you also probably saw an ashtray on nearly every coffee table you sat at.