Passage 2         The trips to resorts in Florida, Arizona and California were a great chance for medics to network.And the visits were all expenses paid. But such events laid the groundwork for a national crisis. From1996 to 2001, American drug giant Purdue Pharma held more than 40 national “pain managementsymposia” at picturesque locations. The healthcare professionals had been specially invited, whiskedto the conferences to be drilled on promotional materials about the firm’s new star drug, OxyContin,and recruited as advocates, the US government later documented. But OxyContin was to becomeground zero in an opioid crisis that has now engulfed the United States.         The pill comprises oxycodone, a semi-synthetic opioid loosely related to morphine andoriginally based on elements of the opium poppy. Such strong painkillers were traditionally used toease cancer pain, but beginning in the mid-1990s, pills based on oxycodone began being branded andaggressively marketed for chronic pain instead—a nagging back injury from manual labor or a caraccident, for example.         Prescriptions issued for OxyContin in the US increased tenfold from 1996 to 2002. A bulletinfrom the American Public Health Association in 2009, reviewing the rise of prescription opioids, istitled, The promotion and marketing of OxyContin: Commercial triumph, public health tragedy. Thisdocument also asserted that Purdue had played down the risks of addiction. By 2002, opioidsprescribed by doctors were killing 5,000 people a year in America and that number tripled over thefollowing decade.
46. What figurative language does the author apply in his/her use of quotation marks, as in “painmanagement symposia”?
(A) metaphor
(B) irony
(C) overstatement
(D) personification