medium · GRE Verbal

Passage: The conventional account holds that the printing press democratized knowledge by making texts cheap. Book historians add a subtler point. Before print, a scribe's errors were confined to a single manuscript; a reader who suspected corruption could consult another copy that erred differently. Print, by contrast, multiplied a single setting of type into thousands of identical copies, so that any error frozen in the forme was reproduced without variation. Standardization, the very trait that made print authoritative, also made its mistakes uniform and therefore harder to detect by cross-comparison. The medium that promised fidelity delivered it indiscriminately, propagating the compositor's blunder with the same efficiency as the author's sentence. The function of the phrase "harder to detect by cross-comparison" is to:

1. Identify the specific drawback that accompanied print's standardizing virtue
2. Prove that printed books were, on the whole, less accurate than handwritten manuscripts
3. Explain why medieval scribes took noticeably more care than early print compositors
4. Argue that readers of manuscripts could never manage to detect a copyist's errors
5. Describe the main reason the printing press lowered the retail cost of books

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