1.   The local theater has had a tenuous existence in recent years.

2.   Founded a year ago in the middle of ethnic rioting that ended in a worker being shot to death, the university continues a tenuous existence.

3.   The youths, particularly Gates, have lived a tenuous existence of their own, culminating in what the police said was murder motivated solely by boredom.

4.   Even when no shells are falling and snipers are inactive, life in this once sophisticated and cosmopolitan city is a tenuous existence of bleak monotony.

5.   Long thought extinct, a victim of poachers and war, the Javan rhinoceros of Vietnam is actually clinging to a tenuous existence.