|Question 10Verbal

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For years, Christopher Clavius's 1593 work Astrolabium had the earliest known evidence of a decimal point, which was in a sine table's interpolation column. However, math historian Glen Van Brummelen posited that Venetian merchant Giovanni Bianchini, who worked as an astrological consultant, used the mathematical symbol approximately 150 years before Clavius did. Van Brummelen asserts that in his role as a consultant, Bianchini used trigonometry to calculate the coordinates of the planets, and these calculations contain the earliest example of the decimal point.
Which finding, if true, would most directly support the underlined claim?
Several dots appear in both Clavius's Astrolabium and Bianchini's Flores Almagesti, but the dot was commonly used in manuscripts in the 1400s and 1500s as a means to separate letters or whole numbers from each other.
A
In Clavius's Astrolabium, he gives several examples of both interpolation and inverse interpolation using decimal numbers and justifies the method to his readers by equating 45.7 with "457 tenths."
B
In a table in Bianchini's astronomical Latin manuscript from the 1440s, Tabulae primi mobilis B, a dot appears between two numbers in a context that suggests the value is not a whole number.
C
As recorded in his manuscripts, some of Bianchini's calculations for the coordinates of the planets are inaccurate due to the use of whole numbers rather than non-whole-number decimals.
D