Adequate sleep

[EricKryk]

Without adequate amounts of sleep, people's newly acquired skills and also new factual information may not get properly encoded into their memory circuits.

(A) Without adequate amounts of sleep, people's newly acquired skills and also

(B) Without the adequate amount of sleep they need, people's newly acquired skills and even

(C) If they do not have adequate amounts of sleep, people's newly acquired skills and even

(D) If people do not get adequate amounts of sleep, newly acquired skills and even

(E) If people do not get the adequate amount of sleep they need, newly acquired skills and also

[Patrick_GMATFix]

Modifiers are incorrectly used in A, B & C (modifiers should target People, not their skills). E commits a redundancy ("the adequate sleep they need") and uses "also" which is less precise in meaning than "even". The full solution below is taken from the GMATFix App.



-Patrick

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Hi EricKryk,

When a GMAT SC is built around commas, the primary grammar rule involved in the sentence is usually modification or parallelism. In this SC, it's modification.

By definition, any modifier (whether it's a single word or an entire phrase) MUST modify the thing next to it. You can quickly run through the first parts of each of the answer choices and see that the modification is incorrect:

A: the opening phrase should modify "people", but instead modifies "people's...skills"
B: the opening phrase should modify "people", but instead modifies "people's...skills"
C: the opening phrase should modify "people", but instead modifies "people's...skills"

Between D and E, E presents a couple of redundant phrases that make this answer incorrect: the pronoun "they" is redundant; the word "also" is redundant to the word "and."

Final Answer: D

GMAT assassins aren't born, they're made,
Rich