Extract:
Yoga
Yoga is an exercise that everyone should try. Yoga was first practiced thousands of years ago. It helps connect the mind and body by taking a person through a series of poses while emphasizing controlled breathing and meditation. Every year hundreds of thousands of people enjoy the benefits of yoga by treating the movements and postures as exercise.
Yoga works by safely stretching muscles, ligaments, and tendons. This helps release the buildup of lactic acid in the muscles that can often cause stiffness, tension, and even pain. Yoga helps develop the body’s range of mobility and increases the ease of everyday movements. Many participants report improved flexibility, especially in the trunk and shoulders, after only two months of practice. Yoga improves posture, balance, and sleep, and it also helps with weight control.
Physically, many yoga poses help build upper-body strength, which is increasingly important as the body ages. Other poses help strengthen the muscles in the lower back, and when properly practiced, nearly all of the poses strengthen the body’s abdominal, or core, muscles. This helps improve the circulation of blood that increases the delivery of nutrients and oxygen to the body and also removes wastes produced by the body. When combined with yoga’s benefit of lowering a person’s heart rate, the result is increased cardiovascular endurance.
The University of Maryland School of Nursing recently published a study that showed yoga was especially effective at reducing stress. In addition, researchers found that yoga surpassed traditional aerobic exercise, often significantly, in improving flexibility, pain tolerance, and daily energy levels. One enthusiast says that her adv
The passage lists all of these benefits of yoga EXCEPT.
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A
improved circulation
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B
strengthening of core muscles
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C
stress reduction
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D
fortification of immune system
The benefit not listed is fortification of the immune system, while circulation and stress reduction might indirectly support immunity, the passage never explicitly states immune strengthening.
A) improved circulation
Explicitly stated: poses "help improve the circulation of blood that increases the delivery of nutrients and oxygen to the body and also removes wastes."
B) strengthening of core muscles
Explicitly stated: "nearly all of the poses strengthen the body's abdominal, or core, muscles."
C) stress reduction
Explicitly stated: University of Maryland study showed "yoga was especially effective at reducing stress."
D) fortification of immune system
Never mentioned. While improved circulation delivers nutrients and removes wastes, and stress reduction might indirectly benefit immunity, the passage makes no explicit claim about immune system strengthening.
Conclusion
Three benefits appear verbatim in the text: circulatory enhancement, core strengthening, and stress reduction. Immune fortification represents a plausible but unstated secondary effect, absent from the passage's explicit benefit catalog.