Read the passage and determine the author's primary argument regarding manuscript digitization:
"Digitizing fragile historical palm-leaf manuscripts ensures their textual content survives physical decay. However, digital preservation cannot replace material conservation. Physical codices possess artifactual evidence—ink chemical composition, parchment biological DNA, and marginal tactile annotations—that flat two-dimensional digital scans inevitably erase."
The author argues that digital archiving:
Answer and explanation
Correct answer: D. preserves textual data but cannot replace physical artifact conservation
- Step 1: Trace the argument: while digitization preserves textual content against decay, 'digital preservation cannot replace material conservation' because scans erase physical, chemical, and biological artifactual evidence.
- Step 2: The author's position is that digitization is valuable for text access but insufficient as a substitute for physical artifact conservation.
Answer
preserves textual data but cannot replace physical artifact conservation.
Why not the others: 'is entirely wasteful and should be immediately discontinued worldwide' ignores the acknowledged benefit of textual preservation; 'destroys the original fragile historical manuscripts during scanning' is an unsupported claim; 'provides all biochemical and DNA data contained in original parchment' directly contradicts the text's assertion that scans erase this evidence.
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