SSC CPO 16th-March-2019-Shift-2

For the following questions answer them individually

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

We often worry about lying awake in the middle of the night - but it could be good for you. A growing body of evidence from both science and history suggests that the eight-hour sleep may be unnatural. In the early 19903, psychiatrist Thomas Wehr conducted an experiment in which a group of people were plunged into darkness for 14 hours every day for a month. It took some time for their sleep to regulate but by the fourth week the subjects had settled into a very distinct sleeping pattern. They slept first for four hours, then woke for one or two hours before falling into a second four-hour sleep. Though sleep scientists were impressed by the study, among the general public the idea that we must sleep for eight consecutive hours persists.

In 2001, historian Roger Ekirch of Virginia Tech published a seminal paper, drawn fiom 16 years of research, revealing a wealth of historical evidence that humans used to sleep in two distinct chunks. Roger Ekirch says a 1595 engraving by Jan Saenredam is evidence of activity at night. His book At Day’s Close: Night in Times Past, published four years later, unearths more than 500 references to a segmented sleeping pattern - in diaries, court records, medical books and literature, from Homer's Odyssey to an anthropological account of modern tribes in Nigeria.

Much like the experience of Wehr‘s subjects, these references describe a first sleep which began about two hours after dusk, followed by waking period of one or two hours and then a second sleep. "It's not just the number of references - it is the way they refer to it, as if it was common knowledge,"Ekirch| says. During this waking period people were quite active. They often got up, went to the toilet or smoked tobacco and some even visited neighbors. Most people stayed in bed, read, wrote and often prayed. Countless prayer manuals fi‘om the late 15th century offered special prayers for the hours in between sleeps. Ekirch found that references to the first and second sleep started to disappear during the late 17th Century. This started among the urban upper classes in northem Europe and over the course of the next 200 years filtered down to the rest of Western society. By the 19208 the idea of a first and second sleep had receded entirely fiom our social consciousness. He attributes the initial shift to improvements in street
lighting, domestic lighting and a surge in coffee houses - which were sometimes open all night. As the night became a place for legitimate activity and as that activity increased, the length of time people could dedicate to rest dwindled.