What is the main idea of the passage?
Sleep is not a passive state in which the brain simply rests. During deep sleep, patterns of activity that were recorded while we were awake are replayed in the hippocampus, a structure that holds new memories only for a short time. The replay is thought to help transfer information to the cortex, where it is stored for the long term. In one study, students who learned a list of word pairs and then slept remembered more pairs the next morning than students who stayed awake for the same period. The effect was largest for material that was linked by meaning. Yet the findings do not show that sleeping a long time guarantees a good memory. Sleep that is broken into short periods seems to weaken the effect, and some kinds of skill learning improve even after a nap of only a few minutes. Researchers still debate how much each stage of sleep contributes.
Answer and explanation
Correct answer: C. Sleep, especially deep sleep, helps to turn new memories into long-term ones
- Step 1: The text describes replay in deep sleep and its role in storage. Step 2. It warns that long sleep is no guarantee. Answer: sleep helps to turn new memories into long-term ones. Why not the others: these contradict or exaggerate the text.
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