  Peripheral nucleon-nucleus collisions occur at the high energies mainly
through the interaction with one constituent quark from the incident nucleon.
The central collisions should involve all three constituent quarks and each of
them can interact several times. We calculate the average number of
quark-nucleus interactions for both the cases in good agreement with the
experimental data on $\phi$-meson, $K^{*0}$ and all charged secondaries
productions in $p+Pb$ collisions at LHC energy $\sqrt s = 5$ TeV.
