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  3. For centuries in Spain and Latin America, heading home for lunch and a snooze with the family was something like a national righ

For centuries in Spain and Latin America, heading home for lunch and a snooze with the family was something like a national righ

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问题     For centuries in Spain and Latin America, heading home for lunch and a snooze with the family was something like a national right, but with global capitalism standardizing work hours, this idyllic habit is fast becoming an endangered pleasure. Ironically, all this is happening just as researchers are beginning to note the health benefits of the mid-afternoon nap.
    According to a nationwide survey, less than 25 percent of Spaniards still enjoy siestas. And like Spain, much of Latin America has adopted Americanized work schedules, too, with shortened lunch times and more rigid work hours. Last year the Mexican government passed a law limiting lunch breaks to one hour and requiring its employees to work their eight-hour shift between 7 a.m. and 6 p.m. Before the mandate, workers would break up the shift—going home midday for a long break with the family and returning to work until about 9 or 10 p.m. The idea of siesta is changing in Greece, Italy and Portugal, too, as they rush to join their more "industrious" counterparts in the global market.
    Most Americans I know covet sleep, but the idea of taking a nap mid-afternoon equates with laziness, unemployment and general sneakiness. Yet according to a National Sleep Survey poll, 65 percent of adults do not get enough sleep. Numerous scientific studies document the benefits of nap taking, including one 1997 study on the deleterious effects of sleep deprivation in the journal Internal Medicine. The researchers found that fatigue harms not only marital and social relations but worker productivity.
    According to Mark Rosekind, a former NASA scientist and founder of Alertness Solutions in Cupertino, Calif., which educates businesses about the advantages of sanctioning naps, we’re biologically programmed to get sleepy between 3 and 5 p.m. and 3 and 5 a.m. Our internal timekeeper—called the circadian clock—operates on a 24-hour rotation and every 12 hours there’s a dip. In accordance with these natural sleep rhythms, Rosekind recommends that naps be either for 40 minutes or for two hours. Latin American countries, asserts Rosekind, have had it right all along. They’ve been in sync with their clocks; we haven’t.
    Since most of the world is sleep-deprived, getting well under the recommended eight hours a night(adults get an average of 6.5 hours nightly), we usually operate on a kind of idle midday. Naps are even more useful now that most of us forfeit sleep because of insane work schedules, longer commute times and stress. In a study published last April, Brazilian medical researchers noted that blood pressure and arterial blood pressure dropped during a siesta.
This text is mainly about______.
选项 A、the health benefits of afternoon naps
B、the negative effects of sleep-deprivation on health and worker productivity
C、the importance of the siesta tradition in Spain and Latin America
D、the siesta tradition and its health benefits
答案D
解析 属主旨思想题。本题考查对全文中心思想的理解。从文章内容来看，不但涉及了午睡的种种好处，而且还讲述了有关午睡的历史和传统，因此能概括这两方面内容的只有选项D。选项A只涉及了文章的一个细节health benefits(对健康的好处)，更重要的是afternoon nap的用词不准确，文章通篇讲的是“睡午觉”，行文中不断出现的关键词有snooze，siestas，midday break。mid—afternoon nap而非afternoon nap，故可排除。选项B、C分别对应文章第_二、四段的内容，不能概括全文。
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