Which statement about static routes is true?

Static routes are defined by network administrators and do not change unless the administrator manually modifies them. This characteristic means that static routes do not dynamically adapt to network topology changes, such as link failures or network additions. Therefore, it is true that they cannot react intelligently to changes in the network environment. As a result, if a path defined by a static route becomes unavailable, packet forwarding will fail until the static route is updated or removed.

The other statements regarding static routes highlight their nature in contrast to dynamic routing. For instance, static routes indeed do not get automatically updated; that is a hallmark of dynamic routing protocols. Static routes usually require more configuration if compared to dynamic routing where protocols handle many configurations automatically. Lastly, static routes do not implement a path selection algorithm like dynamic routes do; they simply use the path specified by the administrator, without evaluating multiple routes or metrics.