Single correct option
Four sentences (1–4) form a paragraph, with one sentence missing. Choose the option that best fills the blank, marked [BLANK], to complete the paragraph coherently.
1. Archivists have long debated how much a damaged historical document should be restored before the restoration itself becomes a kind of falsification.
2. [BLANK]
3. Overly aggressive restoration, by contrast, can erase precisely the marks of age and use that give a document its evidentiary value as an artifact of its own history.
4. The consensus that has emerged favours legibility over cosmetic perfection: repair what obscures meaning, and leave the rest alone.
1. Archivists have long debated how much a damaged historical document should be restored before the restoration itself becomes a kind of falsification.
2. [BLANK]
3. Overly aggressive restoration, by contrast, can erase precisely the marks of age and use that give a document its evidentiary value as an artifact of its own history.
4. The consensus that has emerged favours legibility over cosmetic perfection: repair what obscures meaning, and leave the rest alone.
- A. Digital scanning has made it possible to preserve documents without any physical intervention whatsoever.
- B. Too little intervention can leave a document illegible or at risk of further physical deterioration, defeating the purpose of preserving it at all.
- C. Museums around the world have adopted vastly different standards for how documents should be displayed to the public.
- D. Most historical documents were written on materials that were never intended to survive for centuries.
Show answer and solution
Answer: (B) Too little intervention can leave a document illegible or at risk of further physical deterioration, defeating the purpose of preserving it at all.
The paragraph sets up a tension between too little and too much restoration, resolved in sentence 4 by a middle path ('legibility over cosmetic perfection'). Sentence 3 already covers the 'too much' side (aggressive restoration erasing evidentiary marks), so the blank must supply the missing 'too little' side to set up the balanced conclusion in sentence 4. Option 2 does exactly this, contrasting directly with sentence 3 via 'by contrast'. Options 1, 3 and 4 introduce unrelated tangents (digital scanning, display standards, original materials) that do not set up the two-sided tension the paragraph needs.
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