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Science will continue to invent more things, but most significant improvements in people's lives are done by science.
What is the meaning of 'but' in the above sentence? I am having difficulty understanding this question. Please tell me what is the first portion of the sentence is saying and what is the second. Please break down the sentence while explaining.
If you had given the same task to do, how'd you start your essay? How'd you agree and disagree with the essay?
The example sentence
Science will continue to invent more things, but most significant improvements in people's lives are done by science.
is in my view rather unclear, and may be poorly or even wrongly worded, depending on what the author intends to say. I suspect that the author intends to contrast the new inventions made by science with the "improvements" made, presumably using things that have already been invented. But those are really two stages of the same process, and the use of 'but' in the sentence does not seem ideal to me.
If the sentence had read
Science will continue to invent more things, but most significant improvements in people's lives are done by current technology.
it would be contrasting "science" and "technology", which would make more sense to me. But that is not what the author wrote.
I assume that the author is implicitly evaluating the first half of the sentence as a negative thing. Like “Science will continue to invent more things [and most inventions are useless and costly for society], but most significant improvements in people’s lives are done by science.”
This would explain the “but”, which you know links two opposite sentences (like [some bad thing] but [some good thing]). It would also make the prompt a little more interesting, because you can agree with one part but not with the other part – for example, you can agree that most significant improvement are in people’s lives are done by science but disagree that science’s many inventions are useless and costly for society, etc.
