Response Time Is Critical
You, yes you, are responsible for ensuring that you are an interesting, fun person to have (26) , for being a positive player in the game of life. No matter what your level of (27) to use a given language, you’ll need to be fast. To be able to respond or begin speaking within the usual conversational pause of about half a second or break of (28) four seconds, you’ll need to be able to say something, anything, within those time limits, or you just won’t get a (29) .
We had an interesting example of this in class which accurately (30) real life "on the street". One student, who’d never left Japan and who spoke English at only sixty to seventy words per minute, could generally begin speaking within a second or so (31) he wanted to. His start was strong, but not always meaningful; "Yes, well, yes. Well what I wanted to say..." (32) student had lived and worked in England, could easily speak at one to two hundred words per minute and preferred to be precise (33) he said, taking two to four seconds to prepare before he spoke. By the end of the class round-table debate, the second student said he was feeling frustrated and (34) that no one would listen to him and had only been heard for a few minutes (35) over the hour long debate. On the other hand, the first, slower talking, student had totaled over twenty minutes of speaking time and been the most lucid (=expressive) (36) in the group of six. The first speaker had a hearing because his (37) and initiation time was very fast, while the (38) failed, no matter how much he wanted to talk, because his response time was too slow, slower than any other student. A secondary factor was that when the second student (39) before speaking his first few words were much quieter than his normal speaking volume. The interactive talking possible in lessons gave the second student chances to reduce his response time so that later in the course he could make himself (40) quickly and loudly enough for people to be interested in hearing what he wanted to say.

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 breaks to one hour and requiring its employees to work their eight-hour shift between 7 a.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 hut 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.