阅读理解 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 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 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.

单选题 In the second sentence of Paragraph 1, "all this" refers to______.

【正确答案】 C

【答案解析】指代题。“all this”所在的上下文的大意是：几百年来，西班牙人和拉丁美洲人一直把回家吃午饭、午睡当成一种国民权利，但是随着资本主义全球化的进程使工作时间标准化，这种田园般的生活习惯正迅速演变成一种岌岌可危的享受。具有讽刺意味的是，所有这一切(all this)发生的同时，研究人员也开始注意到午睡对于身体健康的种种好处。由此可见all this指的是上文中的“this idyllic habit is fast becoming an endangered pleasure”，其中idyllic habit和endangered分别对应C项中的siesta tradition(午睡习惯)和decline(衰退)。因此，本题选C。

单选题 We can infer from the second paragraph that Mexican workers now______.

【正确答案】 D

【答案解析】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，把午睡时间缩短为一个小时，并要求员工在上午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或十点钟左右。由此不难推出D项“与过去相比，现在能提早下班”为正确答案。B项与文中内容正好相反，而A、C两项文中没有涉及。

单选题 The word "covet" in Paragraph 3 most likely means______.

单选题 The author suggests that most Americans feel that______.

单选题 This text is mainly about______.

【正确答案】 D

【答案解析】主旨题。文章内容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的内容的只有D。A项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。B、C两项分别对应文章第三、四段的内容，不能概括全文。