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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.
We can infer from the second paragraph that Mexican workers now______.
选项 A、work fewer hours than in the past
B、get home from work much later than in the past
C、work more reasonable hours than in the past
D、finish the workday earlier than in the past
答案D
解析 属信息推断题。本题要求推断第二段中提到的有关墨西哥工人的境况。题目中的关键词Mexican workers出现在本段第三、四句，这两句的大意为：去年墨西哥政府通过一条法律，把午休时间缩短为一个小时，并要求员工从上午7点到下午6点之间完成八小时的工作。此前，工人们中午暂时停止工作，回家同家人一起休息很长一段时间，然后再回去工作直到晚上九、十点钟左右。由此不难推出选项D“与过去相比，现在能提早下班”为正确答案。选项B与文中内容正好相反，而选项A、C文中没有涉及。
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