VOA标准英语2010年-San Franciscans Wonder What Set Off th
时间：2019-01-13 作者：英语课 分类：VOA标准英语2010年(一月)
The California city's history of quakes keeps worry just below the surface
Ted 1 Landphair | Washington, DC 25 January 2010
You had better believe that the people of San Francisco are taking careful note of the cataclysmic Haitian earthquake and its aftermath. This past October marked the 20th anniversary of a killer 2 quake that struck their city in hilly northern California. Like Port-au-Prince, San Francisco sits along a fault line where plates in the earth's crust grind together.
Olivander, Flickr Creative Commons
Pennsylvania writer Charles Morris rushed to San Francisco immediately after the Great Quake of 1906. He produced a book filled with gripping, firsthand accounts of the devastation 3
Sixty-two people died in the 1989 quake. That's a small fraction of the toll 4 that's estimated in Haiti.
But in 1906 another earthquake hit San Francisco. Then, the city was much less developed and protected and the fires that followed destroyed the heart of the city. Officially, 503 people lost their lives. As in Haiti, the true number was much higher, since the quake struck hardest in Chinatown, an area of flimsy structures packed with thousands of undocumented immigrants.
The 2010 Port-au-Prince and 1989 San Francisco earthquakes were nearly identical in intensity 5 at a magnitude of about 7.0. The 1906 San Francisco quake struck 29 years before the Richter scale was adopted, but seismograms from the time have been interpreted at a magnitude of 8.3. If that's accurate, the Great San Francisco Quake was more than 10 times the strength of the Haiti temblor.
Carol M. Highsmith
The San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge is lovely at dawn – but chaos 6 ensued during afternoon rush hour on October 17, 1989, when a 15x23 meter section of the upper deck crashed to the deck below
Many people you meet in the so-called 'City by the Bay' publicly shrug 7 off the odds 8 of another earthquake. They stabilize 9 their buildings as much as possible and trust in fate.
Privately 10, though, they wonder what devastation a super-quake would wreak 11. When a Haiti scale quake strikes elsewhere or the earth shakes enough to get the city's tallest building, the Transamerica Pyramid, swaying, you don't hear as many jokes about what San Franciscans call the Big One.
Read more of Ted's personal reflections and stories from the road on his blog, Ted Landphair's America.
- The invaders gut ted the village.侵略者把村中财物洗劫一空。
- She often teds the corn when it's sunny.天好的时候她就翻晒玉米。
- Heart attacks have become Britain's No.1 killer disease.心脏病已成为英国的头号致命疾病。
- The bulk of the evidence points to him as her killer.大量证据证明是他杀死她的。
- The bomb caused widespread devastation. 炸弹造成大面积破坏。
- There was devastation on every side. 到处都是破坏的创伤。 来自《简明英汉词典》
- The hailstone took a heavy toll of the crops in our village last night.昨晚那场冰雹损坏了我们村的庄稼。
- The war took a heavy toll of human life.这次战争夺去了许多人的生命。
- I didn't realize the intensity of people's feelings on this issue.我没有意识到这一问题能引起群情激奋。
- The strike is growing in intensity.罢工日益加剧。
- After the failure of electricity supply the city was in chaos.停电后，城市一片混乱。
- The typhoon left chaos behind it.台风后一片混乱。
- With a shrug,he went out of the room.他耸一下肩，走出了房间。
- I admire the way she is able to shrug off unfair criticism.我很佩服她能对错误的批评意见不予理会。
- The odds are 5 to 1 that she will win.她获胜的机会是五比一。
- Do you know the odds of winning the lottery once?你知道赢得一次彩票的几率多大吗？
- They are eager to stabilize currencies.他们急于稳定货币。
- His blood pressure tended to stabilize.他的血压趋向稳定。
- Some ministers admit privately that unemployment could continue to rise.一些部长私下承认失业率可能继续升高。
- The man privately admits that his motive is profits.那人私下承认他的动机是为了牟利。