Q.Why do virologists prefer the term "replication" over "reproduction" when describing how viruses multiply?
"Reproduction" normally describes a living cell or organism using its own internal machinery and metabolism to produce new individuals of itself. A virus, however, has no metabolism, no ribosomes, and no machinery of its own capable of building new virus particles; outside a host cell it is chemically inert, incapable of doing anything on its own, as shown by the fact that a virus such as TMV can even be crystallised like an ordinary chemical substance. It is only once a virus enters a living host cell that new copies of it can be produced at all - and even then, it is the host cell's own machinery, redirected by the virus's genetic material, that actually builds the new nucleic acid and protein components, which then assemble into new virus particles. Because the virus itself is not doing the producing - it is being copied by a machinery that belongs to something else, the host cell - virologists reserve the term "replication" for this host-dependent copying process, keeping "reproduction" for the self-directed multiplication that living cells and organisms carry out using their own resources.
[!ANSWER]
"Replication" is used instead of "reproduction" because a virus cannot copy itself using any machinery of its own - it must take over a living host cell's machinery to be copied, which is a fundamentally different, host-dependent process from the self-directed reproduction of a living cell.
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