Your answer — D) Upwards of 6 billion years — was incorrect.

For many years, estimates of the age of the Earth increased as scientific understanding of the planet’s prehistory grew. By the end of the nineteenth century, the most authoritative results of scientific inquiry suggested an age in the tens of millions of years, already a big jump from calculations from biblical evidence that of only several thousand years. It was not until radiometric dating was developed in the twentieth century that the true age was shown to be billions of years greater still. As this quiz is written in May 2019, the latest scientific estimate of the age of the Earth is 4.54 billion years.

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