Numerical answer
Five sentences are given below, numbered 1–5. Four of them form a coherent paragraph; one does not fit. Enter the number of the sentence that does not fit.
1. The printing press, introduced in Europe by Johannes Gutenberg around 1440, dramatically reduced the cost and time needed to reproduce written text.
2. Before its introduction, books were copied by hand, a slow process that kept literacy and book ownership largely confined to religious institutions and the wealthy.
3. Gutenberg is also credited with developing an oil-based ink better suited to metal type than the water-based inks used in earlier hand-copying.
4. Within decades, printing presses had spread across Europe, and the number of books in circulation grew by orders of magnitude.
5. This rapid increase in circulation is widely credited with accelerating the spread of new ideas, including those driving the Reformation.
1. The printing press, introduced in Europe by Johannes Gutenberg around 1440, dramatically reduced the cost and time needed to reproduce written text.
2. Before its introduction, books were copied by hand, a slow process that kept literacy and book ownership largely confined to religious institutions and the wealthy.
3. Gutenberg is also credited with developing an oil-based ink better suited to metal type than the water-based inks used in earlier hand-copying.
4. Within decades, printing presses had spread across Europe, and the number of books in circulation grew by orders of magnitude.
5. This rapid increase in circulation is widely credited with accelerating the spread of new ideas, including those driving the Reformation.
Show answer and solution
Answer: 3
Sentences 1, 2, 4 and 5 trace a single causal thread: the press's invention (1) followed a period of costly hand-copying (2), leading to rapid growth in book circulation (4) and its downstream effect on the spread of ideas (5). Sentence 3, a technical aside about the ink Gutenberg developed, is a tangential detail that interrupts this causal chain about circulation and its consequences — it does not fit.
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