A Chinese podcast · Same story, 4 levels
《经济学人》的玩笑邮件：一家公司想让员工睡好觉，结果全乱套了
The Economist's Joke Memo: A Company Tries to Fix Its Staff's Sleep, and Everything Goes Wrong
About this story
The Economist's Bartleby column wrote a satirical company memo about a sleep program gone wrong: staff woken at 2 a.m. for "pre-industrial" segmented sleep, bosses' 3 a.m. messages that got everyone up earlier, sleep trackers that made people anxious, and a weighted blanket that needed the fire brigade. The episode says plainly that the memo is a joke — then shows the two real things behind it: historian Roger Ekirch's evidence for "first sleep" and "second sleep", and the 2017 finding that tracker scores can make sleep worse. Chinese listening practice at four levels. HSK 1 Chinese listening practice.
This is an HSK 1 Chinese listening episode that runs about 3 minutes. The full Mandarin script is shown with tap-for-pinyin and a line-by-line English translation, so you can listen and read at once — comprehensible input in the sense of Stephen Krashen's i+1 theory. It teaches 12 key vocabulary words such as 睡觉、起床、工作 and walks through 3 grammar patterns, each explained in English with examples. The same news story is retold at 4 difficulty levels — use the level selector above to find the version that is challenging but still understandable for you.
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原文Read the complete story in Chinese. Reveal pinyin and English only when you need them.
English transcript reference
Today, we're telling a joke.
There's a man in Britain whose job is writing.
He wrote about a company.
This company isn't real.
When you hear it, you'll think: this sounds a lot like my company.
The people at this company don't sleep well.
The company's boss thinks: if people don't sleep well, they don't work well either.
The boss says: let's come up with some ideas to help everyone sleep well.
One idea is: get up at two in the middle of the night.
At two in the morning, everyone is asleep.
Get up at two, work for two hours, then go back to sleep.
Why sleep like this?
Because many, many years ago, people all slept this way.
Sleep in the evening, get up in the middle of the night, then sleep again.
This part is true.
Lots of old books wrote about sleeping this way.
But at this company, the idea didn't work very well.
Some people got up in the middle of the night and couldn't fall asleep again.
One man was talking one afternoon with someone who wanted to buy something.
After talking for a while, he fell asleep.
The other person didn't buy anything and left.
Also, the boss wrote to everyone at three in the morning and told them to read it.
Everyone saw it, so they also got up at three to answer the boss.
Everyone at the company ended up sleeping badly.
Another idea: the company gave everyone a little device.
While you sleep, this little device can tell whether you're sleeping well.
But lots of people couldn't figure out how to use it.
Some people slept very well, and the little device said: you slept badly.
When they saw that, they got upset, and then they really couldn't sleep at night.
This part is true too.
Doctors say some people who check these little devices end up sleeping worse.
The device also said: the company's bosses all fell asleep during a meeting.
The company said: that can't possibly be true.
The writer said: sleep is your own business.
Don't make everyone do these things.
And don't check at night on whether people are sleeping well.
He also said: as for this idea, let's sleep on it.
What about you — do you sleep well?
Listen again
Try it without the transcript and notice what sounds clearer.
What vocabulary does this episode teach?
词汇HSK 1. The verb-object form. With 得 you split it: 睡觉睡得不好 / 睡得好.
HSK 1. 半夜两点起床 — the first bad idea.
HSK 1. 大家睡得不好，工作也做不好 — the boss's logic.
HSK 1. 有医生说 — the real finding behind the joke about sleep trackers.
HSK 1. 他们看了，很不高兴 — what a bad sleep score does to you.
HSK 1. 睡觉的时候，这个小东西能看你睡得好不好 — the tracker, working while you sleep.
今天，我们说一个笑话 — the episode tells you up front that the company is invented.
HSK 2. 这个公司，不是真的。
老板半夜三点写东西 — and everyone gets up to answer.
半 (half) + 夜 (night). 半夜两点，大家都在睡觉。
HSK 3. 我们要想一些办法 — each 办法 goes wrong in its own way.
睡不着 = can't fall asleep; 他睡着了 = he fell asleep (mid-sale).
* beyond level超纲词
What grammar patterns appear in this episode?
语法V + 得 + 好 / 不好
Judges how well something is done. With a verb-object word like 睡觉, repeat the verb: 睡觉睡得不好.
这个公司的人，睡觉睡得不好。
大家睡得不好，工作也做不好。
再也 + 不 / 没 + V
Never again — the strongest way to say something stopped.
有的人半夜起床了，再也睡不着了。
……再说吧
Let's deal with it later. 睡一觉再说 is the Chinese twin of "let's sleep on it".
这个办法，我们睡一觉再说吧。
Proper Nouns
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