A third of the planet’s land is severely degraded and fertile soil is being lost at the rate of 24bn tonnes a year, according to a new United Nations-backed study that calls for a shift away from destructively intensive agriculture. The alarming【C1】_____, which is forecast to continue as demand for food and productive land increases, will add to the risks of conflicts unless【C2】______actions are implemented, warns the institution behind the report.

“As the ready supply of healthy and productive land dries up and the population grows, competition is【C3】_____for land within countries and globally,” said executive secretary of the UN Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD) at the launch of the Global Land Outlook. “To【C4】_____the losses, the Outlook suggests it is in all our interests to step back and rethink how we are managing the pressures and the competition.”

The Global Land Outlook is【C5】_____as the most comprehensive study of its type, mapping the interlinked impacts of urbanization, climate change, erosion and forest loss. But the biggest factor is the【C6】__of industrial farming. Heavy tilling, multiple harvests and【C7】__use of agrochemicals have increased yields at the【C8】__of long-term sustainability. In the past 20 years, agricultural production has increased threefold and the amount of irrigated land has doubled, notes a paper in the Outlook by the Joint Research Centre (JRC) of the European commission. Over time, however, this【C9】__fertility and can lead to abandonment of land and【C10】_____desertification.

A) absorb F) expansion K) occasionally

B) abundant G) expense L) optimizes

C) billed H) intensifying M) rate

D) decline I) limited N) remedial

E) diminishes J) minimize O) ultimately

Take Naps at Work. Apologize to No One

A) In the past two weeks I’ve taken three naps at work, a total of an hour or so of shut-eye while on the clock. And I have no shame or uncertainty about doing it. I couldn’t feel better about it, and my productivity reflects it, too.

B) Sleeping on the job is one of those workplace taboos—like leaving your desk for lunch or taking an afternoon walk—that we’re taught to look down on. If someone naps at 2 p.m. while the rest of us furiously write memos and respond to emails, surely it must mean they’re slacking off (偷懒). Or so the assumption goes.

C) Restfulness and recharging can take a back seat to the perception and appearance of productivity. It’s easier to stay on a virtual hamster (仓鼠) wheel of activity by immediately responding to every email than it is to measure aggregate productivity over a greater period of time. But a growing field of occupational and psychological research is building the case for restfulness in pursuit of greater productivity.

D) Companies are suffering from tremendous productivity problems because people are stressed out and not recovering from the workday, said Josh Bersin, principal and founder of Bersin by Deloitte. “They’re beginning to realize that this is their problem, and they can’t just say to people, ’Here’s a work-life balance course, go teach yourself how to manage your inbox,’” Mr. Bersin said. “It’s way more complicated than that.”

E) To be sure, the ability to nap at work is far from widespread, experts said. Few among us have the luxury of being able to step away for a half-hour snoozefest. But lunch hours and coffee breaks can be great times to duck out, and your increased productivity and alertness will be all the evidence you need to make your case to inquiring bosses.

F) In an ideal world, we’d all solve this problem by unplugging early and getting a good night’s sleep. Here’s our guide on how to do just that. But the next best thing is stealing away for a quick power nap when you’re dragging after lunch.

G) In a study published in Nature Neuroscience, researchers tested subjects on their perceptual performance four times throughout the day. Performance deteriorated with each test, but subjects who took a 30-minute nap between tests stopped the deterioration in performance, and those who took a 60-minute nap even reversed it.

H) “Naps had the same magnitude of benefits as full nights of sleep if they had a specific quality of nap,” said Sara Mednick, a co-author of the study and associate professor of psychology at the University of California, Riverside.

I) Dr. Mednick, a sleep researcher and the author of Take a Nap! Change Your Life, said daytime napping can have many of the benefits of overnight sleep, and different types of naps offer specific benefits.

J) For example, Dr. Mednick said a 20- to 60-minute nap might help with memorization and learning specific bits of information. It’s just long enough to enter stage-two sleep, or non-rapid eye movement (non-REM) sleep.

K) After 60 minutes, you start getting into rapid eye movement (REM) sleep, most often associated with that deep, dreaming state we all enjoy at night. REM sleep can improve creativity, perceptual processing and highly associative thinking, which allows you to make connections between disparate ideas, Dr. Mednick said. Beyond that, your best bet is a 90-minute nap, which will give you a full sleep cycle.

L) Any nap, however, can help with alertness and perception and cut through the general fog that creeps in during the day, experts said.

M) So how did we even arrive at this point where aptitude is inextricably tied (紧密相连) to working long, concentrated hours? Blame technology, but think broader than smartphones and laptops; the real issue is that technology has enabled us to be available at all times.

N) “We went through a period where people were in denial and business leaders were ignoring it,” Mr. Bersin said. “They were assuming that if we give people more tools, more emails, more slack, more chatter, and we’ll just assume they can figure out how to deal with it all. And I think they’ve woken up to the fact that this is a big problem, and it is affecting productivity, engagement, health, safety, wellness and all sorts of things.”

O) It isn’t just office workers who can benefit from an afternoon siesta (午睡). A 2015 study published in Current Biology looked at the sleeping habits of three hunter-gatherer preindustrial societies in Tanzania, Namibia and Bolivia.

P) “They’re active in the morning, then they get in the shade under the trees and have a sort of quiet time, but they’re not generally napping,” said Jerome Siegel, professor of psychiatry and biobehavioral sciences, and director of the U.C.L.A. Center for Sleep Research, a co-author of the study. “Then they do some work and go to sleep, and they sleep through the night.”

Q) Still, Mr. Siegel said, “the only genuine way to solve daytime sleepiness and fatigue starts the night before with a solid night’s sleep.” The real restfulness is a regular sleep schedule with ideally seven or eight hours of sleep each night, which experts say is optimal.

R) “Daytime napping certainly does increase alertness,” Mr. Siegel said. “But it’s not as simple as going to the gas station and filling the tank.”

S) He also advises avoiding caffeine late in the day and waking around the same time every morning, even if you can’t get to sleep at the same time every night. This helps acclimate (使适应) your body to your regular wake-up time, regardless of how much sleep you got the night before.

T) So if you’ve made it this far and you’re interested in giving workday naps a try (or just starting to nod off), here’s a quick guide to the perfect nap:

Find a quiet, unoccupied space where you won’t be disturbed.

Try to make your area as dim as possible (or invest in a sleep mask you can keep in the office). Earplugs might help, too.

Aim for around 20 minutes. Any longer than that and you’re likely to wake up with sleep inertia (睡眠惰性 ), which will leave you even groggier (头脑昏沉的) than before.

Every office worker hates meetings. But it’s a strange sort of hate, similar to the hatred of Londoners for the Northern Line, or New Yorkers for tourists who walk too slowly: the dislike is real, yet if the despised thing were to vanish, it’d be like surrendering a piece of your soul.

When researchers probed into why people put up with the strain that meetings place on their time and sanity, they found something surprising—those who resent and dread meetings the most also defend them as a “necessary evil”, sometimes with great passion. True, research suggests that meetings take up vastly more of the average manager’s time than they used to. True, done badly, they’re associated with lower levels of innovation and employee wellbeing. But that’s just office life, right? It’s not supposed to be fun. That’s why they call it work.

Underlying this attitude is an assumption that’s drummed into us not just as workers but as children, parents and romantic partners: that more communication is always a good thing. So suggestions abound for communicating better in meetings—for example, hold them standing up, so speakers will come to the point more quickly. But even when some companies consider abolishing meetings entirely, the principle that more communication is better isn’t questioned. If anything, it’s reinforced when such firms introduce “flat” management structures, with bosses always available to everyone, plus plenty of electronic distraction. In fact, constant connectivity is disastrous for both job satisfaction and the bottom line.

And anyway, once you give it three seconds’ thought, isn’t it clear that more communication frequently isn’t a good thing? Often, the difference between a successful marriage and a second-rate one consists of leaving about three or four things a day unsaid. At work, it’s surely many more than four, though for a different reason: office communication comes at the cost of precisely the kind of focus that’s essential to good work. Yet we’re so accustomed to seeing talking as a source of solutions—for resolving conflicts or finding new ideas—that it’s hard to see when it is the problem.

The Internet has enabled the spread of information at lightning speed. This information revolution has created tremendous business opportunities for online publishers, but not all of them maintain proper quality-control mechanisms to ensure that only good information is being shared. Instead, many publishers aim simply to make money by whatever means possible, with no regard for the implications for society at large.

When selfish publishers set up shops online, the primary goal is to publish as much as possible, often at the cost of quality. In this respect, many publishers start numerous online journals focused on overlapping (重叠的) disciplines—to increase their total number of published papers—and hire young business managers who do not have any experience in either science or publishing. In some cases, online publishers even give up peer review, while still presenting themselves as scientific journals—deception designed to take advantage of scientists who simply want to share their research.

If publishers structure their business to make more revenue, it often does harm to their products. When publishers start journals with overlapping domains, in combination with the pressure to publish more studies, this could promote the publication of marginal or even questionable articles. Moreover, publishers with multiple overlapping journals and journals with very narrow specialties (专业) increase the demands on the time and efforts of willing reviewers. With the fact that reviewers are generally not compensated for their time and effort, journal editors are often unable to find enough reviewers to keep up with the increased publication rate.

To improve the situation and increase the trust in scientific community, the pressure to publish must be reduced. Funding and promotion decisions should not be based on the number of publications, but on the quality of those publications and a researcher’s long-term productivity and instructions.

And that’s just the start. We need additional mechanisms, such as Beall’s list of predatory (掠夺的) publishers, to alert scientists to fake journals and fake articles. In addition, the price for online publication must be controlled and a mechanism must be put in place to honor and reward hard-working reviewers.