AditiSingh4
According to me answer is E.
In D as effective as and equally are redundant.
Please address my query.
Like you, I fell for the trap first and modified the answer choice erroneously.
The problem with E is as follows:
Exercise is
equally effective and
less addictive than most sedatives.
Parallelism marker: AND
element 1: equally effective
element 2: less addictive
Suppose we eliminate the conjunction "and" and the second element. The sentence becomes:
Exercise is equally effective most sedatives.
It is now grammatically wrong.
I reinstated the answer choice to D, though I find it awkward as described in the following post. Nonetheless the above explanation by
Samiksha10 is logical. Read the sentence as ("can be" replaced with "is likely"):
Exercise is equally likely to be
as effective as, and
less addictive than, most sedatives.