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Moving into a world of big data will require us to change our thinking about the merits of exactitude. To apply the conventional mindset of measurement to the digital, connected world of the twenty-first century is to miss a crucial point. As mentioned earlier, the obsession with exactness is an artefact of the information-deprived analog era. When data was sparse, every data point was critical, and thus great care was taken to avoid letting any point bias the analysis. From "Big Data" by Viktor Mayer-Schönberger and Kenneth Cukier, the main point of the paragraph is

1. The twenty-first century is a digital world
2. Big data is obsessed with exactness
3. Exactitude is not critical in dealing with big data
4. Sparse data leads to a bias in the analysis

Correct answer: Exactitude is not critical in dealing with big data

Solution

The paragraph argues that the old obsession with exactness came from the scarcity of data in the analog era. In the big-data era, the main idea is that exactitude is less critical than it used to be.

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