The Information Age and Industrial Revolution "were similar" or "are similar"?

verbs past-vs-present past-tense

The reason why I ask this is because of two reasons:

  1. I first thought that things that occur in the past generally have to be described with past tense verbs.
  2. Then I thought: "By using past tense, doesn't it imply that the similarity is no longer true, even though it may very well still be true?"

Please help. This has been nagging my brain for quite some time now.


are similar. Because one is ongoing, "are" should be used. Saying "were" would imply the latter one is also in the past.

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