Equal-area projections of Earth are primarily designed to preserve area relationships, meaning that they accurately represent the sizes of landmasses. However, this often leads to distortions in other properties.
Therefore, the most accurate response regarding the inaccuracies of equal-area projections is:
Directions and the shapes of the landmasses are distorted.
This option highlights how while area is preserved, other aspects such as angles and shapes can suffer distortion, especially as one moves away from the center of the map.