7) What tips does chronobiology offer for effective dieting?
Eating breakfast rather than dinner helps to lose weight, because calories burn faster in the morning than in the evening.
8) What tips for sleep problems are offered in the text?
Three tips are offered. The first is that we should go to bed at the same time every night and get up at the same time every morning, even on weekends. The second is that the best way to recover from a bad night’s sleep is simply to resume your normal cycle. And the third tip is that we should beware of sleeping pills, as most sleeping pills won’t work for periods longer than two weeks and there is real danger of drug accumulation in the blood.
2 Text A can be divided into four parts with the paragraph number(s) of each part provided as follows. Write down the main idea of each part.
Part Paragraph(s) Main Idea
One 1–4 Our bodies operate with the complexity of clocks. Franz Halberg, a physician-biologist, discovered that there is a 25-hour cycle in the body with the body systems running with regular patterns. Halberg called these regular patterns ―circadian rhythms.‖
Two 5–6 Circadian principles have already been used to schedule astronauts’ work and it is expected that the work in chronobiology will be applied to increasing our efficiency in daily activities.
Three 7–17 Taking the given approach to figure out our body’s patterns, we can then take advantage of chronobiology techniques to improve our health
and productivity in such aspects of life as our daily work, dieting, taking medicine and sleeping.
Four 18 It is important to keep regularity in all aspects of our life and learn to act in synchronization with our body’s natural rhythms.
Task Two Reading Between the Lines
Read the following sentences carefully and discuss in pairs what the author intends to say by the italicised parts.
1. It is barely 5 a.m., but Winget is raring to go. Meanwhile, his wife pulls up the covers and buries her face under the pillow. (Para. 1)
Early in the morning Winget wakes up and is eager to begin the day’s work while his wife still needs more sleep. That is to say, people’s body clocks run at different speeds, thus leading to different waking times.
2. Halberg’s explanation: instead of performing at a steady, unchanging rate, our systems function on an approximately 25-hour cycle. (Para. 4)
Many people believe that our systems work at the same rate all throughout the day, but it is not true.
3. Of course, individual variations make all the difference. (Para. 11)
Different people may show different patterns of temperature change, and such differences reflect differences in their circadian rhythms.
4. ―All the subjects lost weight eating breakfast,‖ states Sothern. ―Those who ate dinner either maintained or gained weight.‖ (Para. 14)
Sothern, a chronobiologist who personally did the research and whose words are to be taken seriously, emphasizes the point that for effective dieting, it’s a good choice to eat breakfast rather than dinner.
5. The best way to recover from a bad night’s sleep is simply to resume your normal cycle. (Para. 17)
The best way to recover from a bad night’s sleep is not to have more sleep in order to make up for the lost sleep, but to go on with your normal sleep-wake cycle, i.e. to go to bed at the same time every night and get up at the same time every morning, even on weekends.
Checking Your Vocabulary Word Detective
1 Put down the right word from Text B in the space provided according to the given definition. The first letter of each word is already given.
Example: election: the choosing by vote of a representative to take an official position
1) isolate: keep apart; separate from others
2) issue: produce (esp. sth. printed and / or official)
3) contract: get or begin to have (sth. bad, esp. an illness)
4) ignorance: lack of knowledge, information, or consciousness
5) broken: made discouraged or weak by misfortune, ill-health, etc.
6) segment: any of the parts into which sth. can be cut or divided
7) community: the people living together and/or united by common background, nationality, etc.
8) prejudice: (an) unfair and unreasonable opinion or feeling, esp. when formed without enough thought or knowledge
2 Fill in each blank with a word or phrase from Text B. Both the explanation and the number of the paragraph in which the target word or phrase appears are given in brackets. Be sure to use the proper form.
Example: She wanted to protect her children from the evils of the outside world.
(great wickedness or misfortune: Para. 7)
1) The two sides never agree. How can I bring their disputes to an end ? (cause sth. to finish, usu. after lasting some time: Para. 1)
2) The SARS victims have to be isolated so that they would not infect others. [(of disease) get into the body of (sb.): Para. 3]
