Instructions

Read the following passage and answer the questions given after it.
Passage:

By the 19205 the improvements in street lighting, domestic lighting and a surge in cofiee houses - which were sometimes open all night — was complete. As the night became a place for legitimate activity, the length of time people could dedicate to rest dwindled.” Evening's Empire puts forward an account of how this happened. "Associations with night before the 17th Century were not good,” it says. “The night was a place populated by people of disrepute - criminals, prostitutes and drunks. Even the wealthy, who could afford candlelight, had better things to spend their money on. There was no prestige or social value associated with staying up all night."

That changed in the wake of the Reformation and the counter- Reformation. Protestants and Catholics became accustomed to holding secret services at night. If earlier the night had belonged to reprobates, now respectable people became accustomed to exploiting the hours of
darkness. This trend migrated to the social sphere too, but only for those who could afford to live by candlelight. With the advent of street lighting, however, socializing at night began to filter down through the classes.

In 1667, Paris became the first city in the world to light its streets, using wax candles in glass lamps. It was followed by Lille in the same year and Amsterdam two years later, where a much more efficient oilpowered lamp was developed. A small city like Leipzig in central Germany employed 100 men to tend to 700 lamps. London didn‘t join their ranks until 1684 but by the end of the century, more than 50 of Europe's major tovms and cities were lit at night. Night became
fashionable and spending hours lying in bed was considered a waste of time.

"People were becoming increasingly time-conscious and sensitive to efficiency, certainly before the 19th Century," says Roger Ekirch. "But the industrial revolution intensified that attitude by leaps and bounds." Strong evidence of this shifting attitude is contained in a medical journal from 1829 which urged parents to force their children out of a pattern of first and second sleep. "If no disease or accident there intervene, they will need no further repose than that obtained in their first sleep.”

Today, most people seem to have adapted quite well to the eight-hour sleep, but Ekirch believes many sleeping problems may have roots in the human body’s natural preference for segmented sleep as well as the ubiquity of artificial light. This could be the root of a condition called sleep maintenance insomnia, where people wake during the night and have trouble getting back to sleep, he suggests. The condition first appears in literature at the end of the 19th Century, at the same time as accounts of segmented sleep disappear.

Question 152

Which of the following is NOT true regarding the nights in 19205 in Europe?


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