The American Heart Association is making it easier to learn the life-saving technique of cardiopulmonary resuscitation. C-P-R courses are being streamlined, shortened from four to two hours, while the procedure itself is getting simpler. The step of checking for a pulse has been removed, since about a third of people don’t do it properly anyway.Rosemary Adam is a registered nurse at University Hospitals in Iowa City and is an officer in the Heart Association’s Iowa chapter. Adam recommends people update their C-P-R training every two years. She hopes shorter classes and easier-to-remember procedures will bring in more students and make them more able to save lives.Another change: rescuers performing C-P-R on adults should do 15 chest compressions for every two breaths, regardless of the number of rescuers. Old guidelines varied those numbers. A quarter-million Americans have heart attacks each year. Outside a hospital, only about 12-hundred survive.