LNAT Practice Passage 10: The Generational Smoking Ban
Read the passage below and answer the four LNAT-style multiple-choice questions. Full answers and explanations follow.
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The Generational Smoking Ban
A. When the Tobacco and Vapes Act received Royal Assent in April 2026, its most unusual provision preserved a date rather than an age. From 1 January 2027, a retailer may not sell tobacco to anyone born on or after 1 January 2009, so the protected group grows older without ever ageing out of the restriction. Ministers describe this as a way to prevent addiction before it begins, rather than forcing existing smokers to surrender a product they already buy legally. The public-health case rests partly on timing: government figures say more than four in five smokers start before 20, while tobacco is associated with around 80,000 deaths a year across the UK. If initiation can be interrupted, supporters argue, fewer people will later need the much harder intervention of quitting.
B. For critics, however, adulthood is an awkward thing to make hereditary. In 2040, two people separated by a few days of birth may possess different legal rights at the tobacconist; the older may buy cigarettes, the younger may not, despite no relevant difference in judgement or intended use. What begins as a rule protecting children therefore becomes, by design, a rule controlling adults.
John Stuart Mill's On Liberty, published in 1859, sharpens the objection. Mill argued that coercion over a competent adult requires more than the claim that restraint would be good for that person; preventing harm to others could justify interference, but saving someone from his own unwise choice was not enough. Smoking complicates the principle because smoke can affect other people and treatment of smoking-related disease has collective costs, yet those considerations do not explain why one adult should be forbidden a purchase available to another solely because of a birth date. Smoke-free laws can protect bystanders; tax can address public costs. A permanent sales prohibition reaches further, denying a choice to adults whom the law otherwise regards as capable of hazardous decisions about alcohol, diet or occupation.
Supporters answer that nicotine addiction weakens the picture of a freely renewed choice: intervention occurs before dependence takes hold, and the cohort rule avoids confiscating cigarettes from current smokers or criminalising possession. The civil-liberties objection remains, because a policy can be gentle in transition and paternalistic in destination. By the 2050s, the argument will no longer concern whether children should smoke; it will concern whether some middle-aged adults may be prevented from starting.
C. For retailers and enforcement officers, the philosophy arrives as a date printed beside the till. Trading Standards will police age-of-sale offences, while the Act also provides for fixed penalties and powers to introduce retail licensing. The arithmetic is plain: the compliant shop trains staff, checks evidence and refuses transactions, and the number of customers to whom tobacco may lawfully be sold contracts as the 2009 cohort ages. Each refusal turns away a paying customer who need only cross the road to a shop willing to take the sale.
D. I have sold cigarettes behind the same counter for nineteen years, and "Challenge 25" at least gives staff an instinctive question: does this person look young enough to require identification? The new rule is simpler on paper because there is only one cut-off date, but simplicity in legislation does not always feel simple across a counter. In 2027 the customer born in 2009 will look eighteen. Years later, staff may be asking for proof from people old enough to have teenage children, while somebody visibly older by only a year remains entitled to buy.
I can explain that Parliament chose the birthday, not me, although that will not stop an argument when two friends are treated differently. Nor can a cashier identify a birth cohort by appearance once everyone involved is plainly an adult. Perhaps electronic age checks will eventually make the exchange routine; until then, the law asks shop workers to police a distinction the human eye becomes steadily worse at seeing. The date on the sign never gets older, even though the customers do.
Questions
Question 1
The last sentence of Passage D implies that:
- Aretailers may eventually need to verify the eligibility of customers who no longer appear young
- Ba customer's appearance will eventually provide better evidence than their date of birth to retailers
- Cretailers will stop requiring identification once the protected generation reaches middle age
- Dthe birth-date restriction will eventually become legally obsolete
Question 2
All the passages suggest that the main difficulty created by the generational ban is that:
- Aa birth-date restriction introduced to prevent youth smoking continues to govern sales after the protected generation reaches adulthood
- Bexisting adult smokers must eventually lose the right to buy tobacco as the protected cohort ages, even though possession remains lawful
- Ctobacco retailers will necessarily lose all cigarette sales within a fixed number of years
- Dsmoking itself must become a criminal offence if restrictions on sales are to be effective
Question 3
Which of the following statements about the generational ban would the writers of A, B and C all agree with?
- AEligibility to buy tobacco is determined by membership of a birth cohort rather than simply by whether the customer is an adult.
- BPreventing adults from buying tobacco is justified whenever doing so reduces future healthcare costs.
- CRetailers bear a commercial cost when they refuse prohibited sales and should therefore receive compensation for the transactions they lose.
- DThe policy cannot succeed unless possession of tobacco is also prohibited.
Question 4
Which of the passages implies but does not state that strict compliance with the ban may sometimes conflict with a retailer's immediate commercial interest?
- AA
- BB
- CC
- DD
Answers & explanations
Question 1: show answer and explanation
Correct answer: A.
retailers may eventually need to verify the eligibility of customers who no longer appear young
D says the cut-off date stays fixed while the people covered by it grow older. The point is that shop staff may eventually have to check customers who look plainly adult, because appearance will no longer indicate whether they fall on the permitted side of the line. Trap: reading "the customers get older" as meaning the restriction itself expires, when the whole point is that it does not.
- A D says the cut-off date stays fixed while the people covered by it grow older. The point is that shop staff may eventually have to check customers who look plainly adult, because appearance will no longer indicate whether they fall on the permitted side of the line.
- B D makes the opposite point: appearance becomes less useful to retailers as a way of identifying the relevant birth cohort.
- C Nothing suggests that identification checks will disappear when the cohort grows older; that development is precisely what makes enforcement unusual.
- D The date remains legally significant rather than becoming obsolete.
Question 2: show answer and explanation
Correct answer: A.
a birth-date restriction introduced to prevent youth smoking continues to govern sales after the protected generation reaches adulthood
A explains that the protected cohort never ages out of the rule; B focuses on the civil-liberties implications once members of that cohort are adults; C shows the same expanding cohort affecting retail sales; and D describes the practical consequences for staff checking increasingly older customers. The same fixed birth-date distinction runs through all four passages. Trap: assuming that a policy designed eventually to reduce smoking must prohibit smoking itself.
- A A explains that the protected cohort never ages out of the rule; B focuses on the civil-liberties implications once members of that cohort are adults; C shows the same expanding cohort affecting retail sales; and D describes the practical consequences for staff checking increasingly older customers. The same fixed birth-date distinction runs through all four passages.
- B Existing legal adult smokers do not later enter the prohibited cohort: eligibility is determined by a fixed birth date, so people born before the cut-off remain outside it.
- C C anticipates a contracting lawful customer base, but none of the passages identifies a date by which all tobacco sales must disappear.
- D The scheme regulates sale rather than making smoking or possession itself unlawful.
Question 3: show answer and explanation
Correct answer: A.
Eligibility to buy tobacco is determined by membership of a birth cohort rather than simply by whether the customer is an adult.
A describes the fixed 1 January 2009 boundary; B's criticism depends on adults on opposite sides of that date receiving different treatment; and C describes retailers applying the same cohort rule as customers age. All three therefore accept this as the defining mechanism, even though they disagree about its merits. Trap: confusing agreement about how a policy works with agreement about whether the policy is justified.
- A A describes the fixed 1 January 2009 boundary; B's criticism depends on adults on opposite sides of that date receiving different treatment; and C describes retailers applying the same cohort rule as customers age. All three therefore accept this as the defining mechanism, even though they disagree about its merits.
- B B specifically questions whether benefits to the smoker or wider society are sufficient to justify coercion of competent adults.
- C C identifies a commercial cost, but none of A, B or C proposes compensation.
- D A and B both make clear that the policy operates without criminalising possession by existing smokers.
Question 4: show answer and explanation
Correct answer: C.
C
C describes the compliant shop training staff, checking evidence and refusing transactions, while noting that a refused customer need only go to a rival "willing to take the sale." It leaves the reader to infer the tension: the shop's legal duty may require it to turn away business which, considered only commercially, a less scrupulous competitor would happily take -- and which the shop itself would benefit from taking. Trap: choosing D because it contains the most vivid account of enforcement, rather than C where the commercial conflict is actually implied.
- A A discusses the public-health rationale and does not address a retailer's financial incentive.
- B B considers liberty and paternalism rather than the economics of individual sales.
- C C describes the compliant shop training staff, checking evidence and refusing transactions, while noting that a refused customer need only go to a rival "willing to take the sale." It leaves the reader to infer the tension: the shop's legal duty may require it to turn away business which, considered only commercially, a less scrupulous competitor would happily take -- and which the shop itself would benefit from taking.
- D D describes practical difficulty and customer disputes, but does not connect refusal to lost revenue.