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Paragraph 5可直接定位至第五段。该段举了三个日用品例子做文章的论点，分析论点是什么需要结合第五段前后文的内容。文章开头说到私营企业会针对消费者创造自动发生的新行为，也就是让消费者形成新习惯。随后第四段又说到，我们在日常使用的许多产品都是商家针对消费者制造新习惯的产物，并以刷牙为例来证明这一点。之后第六段也提到，成功的产品已经成为消费者生活的一部分了。由以上分析可推断，作者在第五段提到的那些日用品是为了揭示它们对人们习惯的影响，故正确答案为A。

错项排除：原文中并没有提到这些产品是daily necessities（必需品），B项属于无中生有，故排除。文章重点强调的是这些产品对人们生活习惯的影响，并非对buying power（购买力）的影响，并且文中也并未提及有关购买力的相关内容，故C项错误。原文中并没有讨论这些新形成的生活习惯是好是坏，所以D项属于无中生有，故排除。