Every few years a new storage medium is announced as permanent. Stone tablets lasted millennia. Paper, properly kept, lasts centuries. Magnetic tape lasts decades, optical discs perhaps less, and a solid-state drive left unpowered in a drawer may lose data in a few years. The trend across the whole history of writing runs in one direction: as storage has become denser and cheaper to write, it has become shorter-lived. Archivists have made peace with this by giving up on permanence entirely and copying everything forward on a schedule, treating preservation as a process rather than a property of the material.
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Correct answer to question 17 (Paragraph Comprehension): tracing a trend through examples, then describing a response to it
Method
The passage walks through storage media from stone to solid state, names the trend those examples reveal, and closes with how archivists responded. No opposing expert is quoted and no solution is rejected.
Updated: November 2026
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