Reading Test 10

North Americans are not a people of the siesta. There is a tendency to associate afternoon naps with laziness and non-productivity. Latin Americans and some in European cultures take a different view. In Mexico and Greece, for example, it is customary to close businesses between noon and about 4:00 pm - siesta time. Recent studies are showing that if you can take a 15 to 30-minute nap while at work in the afternoon, you’ll be more alert, more energetic, happier doing what you do, more productive and therefore more likely to get ahead. Napping on the job is not yet a trend but there is serious talk in academic circles about the merits of ‘power napping’. By some estimate, the average American collects an annual 'sleep debt' of 500 hours - subtracting from an assumed norm of eight hours a night. Two out of three Americans get less than eight hours of sleep a night during the work week, according to a recent study by the National Sleep Foundation in Washington. Forty percent say they're so tired that it interferes with their daily activities. Sleep researcher William Anthony, a professor of psychology at Boston University, says fatigue is a significant problem in modern society. He says sleepiness is a leading cause of auto accidents, second only to drunkenness. All that drowsiness costs an estimated $18 billion annually in lost productivity. 'We have a simple message,' says Professor Anthony. 'People should be allowed to nap at their breaks. The rationale is a productivity one - workers are sleepy, and when they're sleepy on the job they’re not productive.'  Some companies…

Homeopathy is an alternative system of medicine, founded in the early 19th century by a German physician, Dr. Samuel Hahnemann. Since 1980, homeopathy has experienced a strong resurgence of interest in North and South America as well as in Europe. Surveys indicate that more than a third of French physicians have prescribed homeopathic remedies and almost 50 percent of British physicians have referred patients for homeopathic treatment. Hahnemann’s discovery of the principle of homeopathy was accidental. After taking some quinine, he noticed that he developed malaria-like symptoms. Since malaria patients were treated with quinine, he speculated that possibly malaria is cured by quinine because it causes malaria-like symptoms in healthy people. He decided to explore his theory by testing other substances used as medicine at the time, such as arsenic and belladonna. His tests were conducted by either taking the substances internally himself or by administering them to healthy volunteers and then recording all of the symptoms the volunteers experienced. He continued his experiments on a wide range of natural substances, often toxic. These recorded results created ‘drug pictures’ which formed the basis for the new system of medicine. The next step was to give the tested substances to patients suffering from the same group of symptoms represented by the drug picture recorded. The results were incredible. People were being cured from diseases that had never been cured before. He condensed his theory into a single Latin phrase: similia similibus curentur (let likes be cured by…

The hemp plant, one of the world’s oldest industrial resources, is back. The rediscovery of this renewable resource is making it the fibre of choice for future textiles, personal care products, building materials, paper and fuel. Hemp has been grown for paper, textiles, food and medicine throughout human history. The earliest known woven fabric, made of hemp, dates back to the eighth millennium (8000-7000 BC). The majority of all sails, clothes, tents, rugs, towels, paper, rope, twine, art canvas, paints, varnishes and lighting oil were made from hemp. Hemp seeds were regularly used as a source of food and protein for centuries. Hemp’s drastic decline in use and importance within a matter of fifty years is widely considered to have been brought about by the timber and petrochemical industries in America. By the mid- 1930s, changes in technology were beginning to impact on the hemp industry. Mechanical stripping equipment and machines to conserve hemp’s high-cellulose pulp became available and affordable. Timber and paper holding companies stood to lose billions of dollars if hemp were to be grown on a large scale. A resurgence of the hemp industry also threatened the emerging petro-chemical companies which had patented the chemicals for pulp processing. Newspaper articles began to appear, linking hemp with violent crime. The term used, however, was ‘marijuana’ to distance it from hemp used for industrial purposes. Because few people realised that marijuana and hemp came from the same plant species, virtually nobody suspected that the Marijuana Prohibition of 1938 would…