TakeAwayEnglish随身英语29April2013.PDF

Take Away English 随身英语 29 April 2013 No sleep at the top 据说领袖们不用睡觉 Vocabulary: lack of sleep 词汇: 缺觉 Do you need a lot of sleep? Some famous leaders are thought to have spent little time in the land of Nod so keen they were on their high-powered jobs. The late Margaret Thatcher earned a reputation for getting by on four hours a night. Tirelessness became part of the former British PMs mystique and her officials had to keep up with her. They could find themselves working on a speech until the small hours of the morning. Winston Churchill used to sleep four hours a night during the war Another British head of government, Winston Churchill, survived on four hours a night during the Second World War. But as the BBC reporter Tom de Castella points out, what is less often noted is that he had regular afternoon naps in his pyjamas. Napoleon Bonaparte was not a man to sleep on the job. When asked how many hours of sleep he needed, the famous French general is said to have replied: Six for a man, seven for a woman, eight for a fool. How about ordinary people? Should we try to stifle our yawns and embrace insomnia? If you want to impress colleagues in the world of business its certainly something to strive for. High-profile chief executives from Marissa Mayer at Yahoo! to Pepsis Indra Nooyi get by on four hours a night, while Donald Trump claims to survive on three. Geraint Anderson, author of City Boy, who worked as an analyst and stockbroker for 12 years, says: There was a real macho competition in the City about sleep. One of the ways of getting respect was bragging about how little you got. Experts say that theres nothing wrong with the habit of burning the midnight oil. The only rule is to sleep long enough to feel refreshed when you wake up. Prof James Horne, at Loughboroughs sleep research centre, says that mood is