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UPCAT Reading Comprehension practice question 27: The passage is chiefly concerned with arguing that

Correct answer

B. sleep is an active stage of learning rather than a pause between periods of it

The passage opens by rejecting the view of sleep as a pause and closes by calling it one of the periods of learning.

Sleep and the Sorting of Memory

Reading passage · 190 words

The old view of sleep treated it as a pause, a period in which the brain simply idled while the body repaired itself. Recordings of neural activity have made that description untenable. During deep sleep, the hippocampus replays sequences of activity from the day at accelerated speed, and the cortex receives them. Over successive nights, memories that begin as fragile hippocampal traces are gradually stabilized in cortical networks.

This process is selective. Not everything encoded during waking hours is retained, and the sorting appears to favor material the brain has been given reason to treat as important, whether by emotional weight or by a signal that it will be needed again.

The practical implication runs against a common student habit. A single long night of study before an examination allows almost no consolidation, because consolidation requires sleep that the night has been spent avoiding. The same total hours distributed across a week, each session followed by ordinary rest, produce markedly better retention.

Sleep, on this account, is not the interval between periods of learning. It is one of the periods of learning, and the one during which the sorting actually happens.

The passage is chiefly concerned with arguing that

  1. the hippocampus is more important to memory than the cortex
  2. sleep is an active stage of learning rather than a pause between periods of itCorrect
  3. emotional memories are always retained better than neutral ones
  4. students need more total study hours than they usually attempt

Why B is correct

The passage opens by rejecting the view of sleep as a pause and closes by calling it one of the periods of learning.

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