Self-compassion is made up of mindfulness, the ability

Hello Everyone!

While this may look like an incredibly complicated question to answer, we think you can tackle it pretty quickly if you can identify what type of question it is: a LIST question! To begin, let's take a quick scan over the options and highlight any major differences in orange:

Self-compassion is made up of mindfulness, the ability to manage thoughts and emotions without being carried away or repressing them, common humanity, or empathy with the suffering of others, and self-kindness, a recognition of your own suffering and a commitment to solving the problem.

A. away or repressing them, common humanity, or empathy with the suffering of others,
B. away, or repression of them, and common humanity, or empathy with the suffering of others,
C. away, or repressing them, common humanity, empathy with the suffering of others;
D. away or repressing them; common humanity, an empathy with the suffering of others;
E. away or repress them; common humanity, to empathize with the suffering of others

After a quick scan, there are a few key differences we can focus on here:

1. repressing / repression of / repress (Parallelism)
2. , common / , and common / ; common (Punctuation & Lists)
3. , or empathy / , empathy / , an empathy / , to empathize (Parallelism & Punctuation)
4. others, / others; / others (Punctuation & Lists)

There is a lot here, so let's focus on #1 on our list: Parallelism. This should be a pretty easy way to eliminate a couple wrong choices quickly. To figure out what the word repressing/repression/repress is paired with, we need to look to the non-underlined portion of the sentence:

Self-compassion is made up of mindfulness, the ability to manage thoughts and emotions without being carried away or repressing them, common humanity, or empathy with the suffering of others, and self-kindness, a recognition of your own suffering and a commitment to solving the problem.

We need to keep "being carried away" the way it is because it's not underlined, and eliminate the options that don't use parallel structure:

A. away or repressing them, common humanity, or empathy with the suffering of others,
B. away, or repression of them, and common humanity, or empathy with the suffering of others,
C. away, or repressing them, common humanity, empathy with the suffering of others;
D. away or repressing them; common humanity, an empathy with the suffering of others;
E. away or repress them; common humanity, to empathize with the suffering of others

We can eliminate options B & E because they don't use an -ing word to make them parallel to "being carried away."

Now that we have things narrowed down a bit, let's focus on the fact that this is a LIST question. If we look carefully, we see that this isn't just any old list - it's a COMPOUND LIST:

Self-compassion is made up of mindfulness, the ability to manage thoughts and emotions without being carried away or repressing them, common humanity, or empathy with the suffering of others, and self-kindness, a recognition of your own suffering and a commitment to solving the problem.

A compound list is a type of list where each item includes commas within it, which makes figuring out which items go together incredibly difficult. For compound sentences, you should separate each item with a semicolon, rather than just a comma. That way, it's clearer to readers what goes with what.

Let's see which options handle this correctly, and eliminate those that don't:

A. away or repressing them, common humanity, or empathy with the suffering of others,
This is INCORRECT because there should be a semicolon separating each item instead of just a comma. For this sentence, there needs to be semicolons before "common" and after "others" to properly break up the list.

C. away, or repressing them, common humanity, empathy with the suffering of others;
This is INCORRECT because it doesn't separate mindfulness from common humanity with a semicolon like it needs to. It does separate common humanity from self-kindness, but that's not enough to make this correct.

D. away or repressing them; common humanity, an empathy with the suffering of others;
This is CORRECT! It uses semicolons to properly separate each item, allowing the commas inside each item to distinguish that they are defining each term and are not more list items.

There you have it - option D is the correct choice! It uses parallel structure and proper punctuation for a compound list.

Don't study for the GMAT. Train for it.

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