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
What is the meaning of the word tolerance as used in the last paragraph?
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A
Open-mindedness
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B
Approval
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C
Endurance
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D
Generosity
In the exercise physiology context, tolerance means endurance, the capacity to withstand or sustain discomfort without yielding.
A) Open-mindedness
Open-mindedness refers to receptivity to new ideas, cognitive flexibility unrelated to physical capacity for sustaining discomfort during exercise.
B) Approval
Approval means agreement or acceptance, social/emotional response rather than physiological capacity. Pain tolerance concerns bodily endurance, not evaluative judgment.
C) Endurance
Endurance precisely matches pain tolerance's meaning in fitness contexts: the ability to persist through discomfort. Yoga practitioners develop greater capacity to sustain physical challenge, exactly the connotation of endurance applied to pain thresholds.
D) Generosity
Generosity refers to willingness to give, moral quality unrelated to physical capacity for withstanding discomfort.
Conclusion
Context determines word meaning. In exercise science, "pain tolerance" specifically denotes physiological endurance, the threshold at which discomfort becomes unbearable. Only endurance captures this specialized connotation within fitness discourse.