I think there’s enough evidence to show that the answer should (must?) be precarious. Semicolon shows a support to the following statement: “our planet has experienced at least five ice ages in its 4.5-billion-year lifespan.” What does the blank support? The fact that our planet has experienced at least five ages. “Anything but” acts like a contrast, so we can paraphrase it to “not.”
Now, “precarious” means “delicate” (Google it!) and therefore, it fits properly: “Our planet is not delicate, we have experienced five frikkin ice ages!!” Any planet, let’s say Mars, can’t just casually drop that it has experienced 5 ice ages like it’s nothing!
What do you say?
Additional point: What is the evidence in the passage that the five ice ages “changed” Earth.
I feel a better question is why is precarious a better choice than immutable? They’re saying at long enough time spans the earth is anything but unchangeable over time. Meaning it’s changeable. Here’s the proof. The earth has had five ice ages in 4.5 million years.
Sure withstanding five ice ages means the earth is not delicate but I feel like we don’t have context for that in this sentence and we are bringing in opinion/outside knowledge.
What is your evidence that the five ice ages “changed” Earth? Nothing in the passage suggests that ice age brings upon any change to planet.
At the very least, this seems to be a poorly written question. No shots fired, I am open to having my mind changed. Nothing but respect to the people writing these questions!
Because the actual meaning of ice age is a period where the earth freezes. So the evidence for the changes is how it’s gone cold and not cold over 5 times.
That’s fair, so how do you think we would make this question fairer? For transparency, the correct rate for this question is 59%.
I think my evidence is that over long periods of time the earth experiences change (five ice ages) the converse of which would be that day to day it appears not to change. Perhaps I’m bringing in outside knowledge of what an ice age is but they do change the earth quite a bit. If it had just been one ice age I’d think differently bc it could be an anomaly. However the fact that there have been five over this large span of time means that the earth regularly experiences change.
I think you could possibly justify delicate if the word “experienced” was changed to “survived” or “withstood” but as it stands I think you’re adding some meaning to the word experienced that isn’t justified by the sentence.
I just feel that this question isn’t as airtight as a typical ETS question. But I could also be wrong, my bias towards my interpretation might have led me to this conclusion!
