Numerical answer
Five sentences are given below, numbered 1-5. Four of them, when arranged in order, form a coherent paragraph. One sentence does not fit. Identify the number of the sentence that should be excluded.
1. The invention of double-entry bookkeeping in medieval Italian trading cities is often treated as a minor technical footnote to the history of commerce.
2. In fact, by allowing merchants to track assets, liabilities, and profit systematically across many simultaneous transactions, it made possible forms of large-scale, long-distance trading partnerships that informal record-keeping could not reliably support.
3. Venice and Genoa were fierce commercial rivals throughout the medieval and early Renaissance periods, competing for control of Mediterranean trade routes.
4. Historians have since argued that this accounting innovation was a genuine precondition for the rise of merchant capitalism, not merely a convenience that recorded a growth already happening for other reasons.
5. Some scholars go further, suggesting that the discipline of balancing accounts also shaped a broader cultural shift toward rational, calculable planning in economic and even personal life.
1. The invention of double-entry bookkeeping in medieval Italian trading cities is often treated as a minor technical footnote to the history of commerce.
2. In fact, by allowing merchants to track assets, liabilities, and profit systematically across many simultaneous transactions, it made possible forms of large-scale, long-distance trading partnerships that informal record-keeping could not reliably support.
3. Venice and Genoa were fierce commercial rivals throughout the medieval and early Renaissance periods, competing for control of Mediterranean trade routes.
4. Historians have since argued that this accounting innovation was a genuine precondition for the rise of merchant capitalism, not merely a convenience that recorded a growth already happening for other reasons.
5. Some scholars go further, suggesting that the discipline of balancing accounts also shaped a broader cultural shift toward rational, calculable planning in economic and even personal life.
Show answer and solution
Answer: 3
Sentences 1, 2, 4, and 5 form a coherent argument about how double-entry bookkeeping enabled and then reshaped commerce and culture. Sentence 3 introduces an unrelated fact about Venetian-Genoese rivalry over trade routes that does not connect to the paragraph's specific claim about bookkeeping's causal role, making it the sentence to exclude.
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