Hi,
“External factors play a big role, and people cannot hide behind bad luck. They can’t smoke and say it’s bad luck if they have cancer. It is like a revolver, intrinsic risk is one bullet. …
Now, what a smoker does is add two or three more bullets to that revolver. And now, they pull the trigger.”
–The closest equivalent of ‘now’ I managed to come up with here, was ‘so’. Or…?
I think it can also be ‘Yet’ because it sounds like (alludes to) the smoker keeping smoking even more!
‘Yet’ work well, but because it follows on from ‘now, what a smoker does is…’ I would say ‘and then’ fits best.
That is acceptable too. But again we can see ‘And now’. Wouldn’t that redundancy sound a bit awkward?
Perhaps It was too short an excerpt from me, to catch on it immediately.
In the article, the author weighs up the role of intrinsic factors, as well as external, in having cancer.
Intrinsic risk—“one bullet [already] in a revolver”–can be aggravated by smoking, which adds “two or three more bullets” to that Russian roulette.
If I got it right, you could read it like, “So, what a smoker does is… And then, they (those additional bullets loaded in) pull the trigger.”(= initiate a chain reaction).
You see, Eugene, it all depends on the feeling one has on the spur of the moment. As you desired to have an equivalent, we suggested ‘yet’ and ‘and then’. Neither of us said what you came up with was not acceptable. Now I’d reiterate that ‘so’ is also possible.
I don’t think ‘so’ really fits well.
It implies that the trigger is pulled by the action of loading the bullets. That doesn’t make sense. The point is that with more bullets in the chamber, when the trigger is pulled you are more likely to get hit.
My last reading was, "So, what a smoker does is… And then, they (those additional bullets loaded in) pull the trigger.”
Do you mean “Yet what a smoker does is…” sounds better?
I agree with “The point is that with more bullets in the champer, when the trigger is pulled you are more likely to get hit.” But who is ‘they’ in "they pull the trigger” then? To me, the latter is figurative for ‘initiate a chain reaction’ there, a factor which shifts the balance in your body…
Smokers pull the trigger by acting recklessly?..
Then I wouldn’t interpret ‘now’ any other then it is:
"So\Yet, what a smoker does is… And now, (with the chamber loaded) they (smokers) pull the trigger.”
No. You seem to be becoming confused. There should be no change to the first ‘yet’, Anglophile suggested changing ‘now’ to ‘yet’. I think there is a better fit though.
The smokers.
Sorry, I don’t understand your thinking there.