英语听力练习下载：生物钟与体育成绩

Our internal body clock has such a dramatic impact on sporting ability, it could alter the chances of winning Olympic gold and even determine Champions League football success, say researchers. The University of Birmingham study showed that performance times varied by 29 percent throughout the day. Our health correspondent told me more. This is an old idea. I mean, you have a body clock inside. It changes lots of other things including your athletic ability. Now they’ve always thought that you used to have your peak of athletic performance around about late afternoon. But what they realize is all these studies were just looking at everybody together. What about people used to like to stay up late at night? So they did the study on a bunch of British hockey players and to see at what time of day their actual peak really was. So in the early risers, they found that their peak was around about lunch time, around about noon. Now if you think about the Olympic Games, you have athletes coming from all over the world to one place. Try to find out what time your competition is gonna be. You know, the 100-meter’s final is always in the evening. It’s never early in the morning. I suppose that could explain partially home advantage, but is there a cultural difference to certain countries? Well, this is one of the things I’m not entirely sure. But if you look at the Champions League, the pinnacle of European football, you tend to find that the Spanish have a naturally later society, tend to eat much later. Portugal’s government has approved rules under which descendents of Jews expelled from the country centuries ago can now claim Portuguese citizenship. Alison Roberts reports from Lisbon. Portugal’s parliament almost two years ago approved a law for allowing for the naturalization of descendents of Jews expelled five centuries ago, but with statutory regulations lacking, no applications have beenpossible. Now the government has finally amended the nationality rules to make special provision for descendents of Sephardic Jews, as members of the community formed in Iberia are known who can prove a strong link to Portugal. This might, the government said, be a combination of surname, language used in the family or proof of direct descents. Many of the thousands of Jews expelled in 1497, five years after Spain’s ownorder of expulsion, or who fled later to avoid forced conversion to Christianity, continued to use a form of Portuguese in their new communities in Amsterdam, Istanbul, New York and across Brazil. As the government notes, Jews settled in this part of Iberia long before the Kingdom of Portugal was founded in the twelfth century.