Which choice most effectively introduces the specific problem the rest of the paragraph describes?

For roughly two thousand years, Hebrew survived without anyone actually speaking it as a first language. It remained very much alive in prayer, in religious study, and in scholarly writing, but the everyday task of raising a child, ordering food, or arguing about politics had, for centuries, fallen to whatever local language a Jewish community happened to speak wherever it lived. [1] Eliezer Ben-Yehuda arrived in Palestine in 1881 believing this arrangement did not have to be permanent.

His specific goal was narrower and more ambitious than simply promoting interest in Hebrew. [2] Ben-Yehuda wanted Hebrew restored as a genuine, everyday spoken language, used for the same ordinary purposes any living language serves its speakers. [3] The scale of the problem this goal created becomes clear once a single obvious fact is stated directly: [4] a language built almost entirely around ancient religious and literary vocabulary has no existing word for a great many things a modern household actually needs to discuss.

Ben-Yehuda's response to this gap was direct. [5] He simply began inventing words, coining Hebrew terms for concepts the ancient language had never needed to name, and he kept doing this for the rest of his working life. [6] By the end of his life, he had helped standardize and popularize a large modern Hebrew vocabulary, drawing both on older Hebrew sources and on newly coined terms.

Perhaps the most striking part of his strategy involved his own family. [7] When his first son was born in 1882, Ben-Yehuda made a specific, demanding request of his wife: raise the child hearing only Hebrew, from every visitor and family member, for every ordinary need a small child has. [8] If a language that had produced no native speakers for roughly two thousand years could produce even one again, inside a single household, the larger project suddenly looked considerably less impossible.

The broader effort succeeded on a scale far beyond one household. [9] By 1922, barely four decades after Ben-Yehuda's arrival, Hebrew had gained official recognition as a language of British Mandate Palestine, spoken not just by his own children but by a growing community of settlers who had adopted it as their common language. Linguists studying language revitalization efforts around the world still point to this case as the clearest example of a language moving from purely ceremonial use back into full, ordinary daily life. [10]