Over the past decade, many companies had perfected the art of creating automatic behaviors—habits—among consumers. These habits have helped companies earn billions of dollars when customers eat snacks or wipe counters almost without thinking, often in response to a carefully designed set of daily cues.

    “There are fundamental public health problems, like dirty hands instead of a soap habit, that remain killers only because we can’t figure out how to change people’s habits,” said Dr. Curtis, the director of the Hygiene Center at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine. “We wanted to learn from private industry how to create new behaviors that happen automatically.”

The companies that Dr. Curtis turned to—Procter & Gamble, Colgate-Palmolive and Unilever—had invested hundreds of millions of dollars finding the subtle cues in consumers’ lives that corporations could use to introduce new routines.

    If you look hard enough, you’ll find that many of the products we use every day—chewing gums, skin moisturizers, disinfecting wipes, air fresheners, water purifiers, health snacks, teeth whiteners, fabric softeners, vitamins—are results of manufactured habits. A century ago, few people regularly brushed their teeth multiple times a day. Today, because of shrewd advertising and public health campaigns, many Americans habitually give their pearly whites a cavity-preventing scrub twice a day, often with Colgate, Crest or one of the other brands.

    A few decades ago, many people didn’t drink water outside of a meal. Then beverage companies started bottling the production of far-off springs, and now office workers unthinkingly sip bottled water all day long. Chewing gum, once bought primarily by adolescent boys, is now featured in commercials as a breath freshener and teeth cleanser for use after a meal. Skin moisturizers are advertised as part of morning beauty rituals, slipped in between hair brushing and putting on makeup.

    “Our products succeed when they become part of daily or weekly patterns,” said Carol Berning, a consumer psychologist who recently retired from Procter & Gamble, the company that sold $76 billion of Tide, Crest and other products last year. “Creating positive habits is a huge part of improving our consumers’ lives, and it’s essential to making new products commercially viable.”

    Through experiments and observation, social scientists like Dr. Berning have learned that there is power in tying certain behaviors to habitual cues through ruthless advertising. As this new science of habit has emerged, controversies have erupted when the tactics have been used to sell questionable beauty creams or unhealthy foods.

答案精析：根据题干中的Dr. Curtis 和habits like hand washing with soap可定位至原文第二段首句。柯蒂斯博士说道：“像不用肥皂洗手这类基本的公共卫生问题仍然威胁着人们的健康，这是因为我们不知道该如何改变人们的习惯。”随后这位博士又说道：“我们想向私营企业学习如何创造自动发生的新行为。”也就是说，专家们仍不知道该如何把用肥皂洗手变为人们的生活习惯。由此可以推断出，用肥皂洗手这样的习惯应该要进一步培养，故正确答案为A。

错项排除：原文第二段第一句出现了change people’s habits和remain，分别作为B、C两项的干扰，但原文说的是人们不用肥皂洗手的习惯仍然存在，并且应该被改变，B、C两项属于反向干扰，故排除。原文明确说到这些是public health problems（公共卫生问题），并非private concerns（私人问题），D项与原文不符，故排除。