发布时间： 2017年05月23日

四级六级阅读练习（56）：我们该不该吃早餐？

小编寄语：熟悉四六级阅读理解题型的同学应该都了解，英语四六级考试阅读理解材料大多选自《时代》《卫报》《今日美国》等外刊。要想阅读理解这部分拿到高分，必须在平常多阅读，掌握新词汇，锻炼阅读速度。但对于很多同学来说，如何每日在浩瀚的互联网世界寻找合适的阅读材料进行分析解读是一项很耗时间的事情。为此，　英语每日精选《卫报》《时代》等外刊上的文章供大家进行阅读练习。

【今日阅读推荐】本篇阅读材料“我们该不该吃早餐？”选自《卫报》（原文标题：Should I eat breakfast? 2012.10.28）。如果大家觉得比较简单，就当作泛读材料了解了解，认识几个新单词或新表达方式也不错。如果大家觉得这些材料理解上有难度，不妨当做挑战自己的拔高训练，希望大家都有进步^^

Studies have shown that a good breakfast could hold the key to healthiness.

Up to two-thirds of us skip the first meal of the day but nutritionists say we should breakfast like kings and eat less later. There is some research that links eating a good breakfast with a reduction in the risk of obesity, diabetes and heart disease. While it's tempting to miss breakfast when you're on a diet, it's not clear that this helps you to lose weight.

Last week a research team from Imperial College London presented its findings at the Neuroscience 2012 conference. The researchers scanned the brains of 21 healthy people as they showed them a variety of foods including chocolate, pizza and salad. They compared how attractive the foods were to people, as well as how much they ate for lunch after the scan on two days, one on which breakfast was missed and one on which they ate a large breakfast (750 calories). The researchers found that missing breakfast increased the appeal of high-calorie foods (as measured by increased orbital frontal cortex activity on the brain scan) and that people ate about 250 calories more at lunch. The researchers said this shows breakfast takes the edge off our appetite so we don't crave high-calorie foods. So, how should we be starting our days?

The solution

Studies have come up with a variety of suitable breakfast foods. There is some evidence in favour of the full English version (on the basis that eating fats primes the metabolism to be more efficient for the rest of the day). However, that study was done on mice and is not convincing – although the mice who ate a good breakfast were less likely to get chubby.

Chocolate cake is recommended by researchers from Tel Aviv University who found that a 600-calorie breakfast with proteins and carbohydrates, including a sweet treat, controlled cravings for sweet things for the rest of the day and kickstarted the body's metabolism. Their study looked at 193 obese people over 32 weeks and found those who ate sweet things at breakfast lost an average of 40lb more than those who didn't.

A study in the US journal Pediatrics of more than 2,000 teenagers found that a quarter missed breakfast but that those who ate it were on average five pounds lighter (and ironically less likely to have been dieting) than those who didn't.

However, it is always hard to prove cause and effect in dieting studies. People who eat breakfast often turn out to take more exercise and drink less alcohol so there may be other reasons for their weight loss.

A review of the research that added up results of nine studies on the relationship between eating breakfast cereals and weight, found that children and adults who regularly ate breakfast cereals (the study was funded by Kellogg's) were less likely to be overweight than those who did not eat them. The authors say this doesn't provide proof that cereals help you stay slim and that there was no evidence that their cereal eaters ate less throughout the day.

So, although eating breakfast is linked with being slimmer, this may simply be an association. There is, however, another more robust body of evidence that suggests children benefit from eating breakfast because it helps them to concentrate.

【重点单词及短语】

hold the key to 掌握

frontal cortex 额叶皮层（大脑的一部分）

take the edge off 减弱（胃口）等；使变弱

crave v. 渴求；渴望

prime v. 使准备好；做准备

metabolism n. 新陈代谢

Question time:

1. What are the findings of researchers from Imperial College London?

2. Can you list the benefits of having breakfast according to the passage?

编辑推荐：

新东方英语四级：https://www.thea.cn/wx1820/