To prevent tsunami-caused disasters, several countries worked together to expand the use of a tsunami-detecting system that had been developed in the United States by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). The system________ of an instrument installed on the seafloor — called a tsunameter — that measures pressure changes caused by a passing tsunami. The tsunameter sends a signal to a surface buoy (浮标), which sends the data to a satellite, which ________ the information to warning centers around the world.
By 2004 only six such detectors had been installed, all in the Pacific. There were________ in the Indian Ocean, and many countries in the region had no national warning centers that could have ________ local communities. That policy mistake had tragic consequences. In Sumatra people had only a few minutes to run, ________the tsunami took two hours to reach India, and some 16,000 people died there. “It was totally unnecessary,” says Paramesh Banerjee, a geo-physicist at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. “Technically it would have been relatively ________ to install a tsunami warning system for the Indian Ocean.”
There are now 53 detector buoys operating in the world’s oceans, including 6 of a planned 27 in the Indian Ocean. So a (n)________ of the 2004 horror, in which the tsunami traveled for hours and still caught people by ________ is less likely. But buoys would not have helped in Sumatra. People living on coasts near a rupturing fault (地壳断层) can’t wait for ________ that a tsunami is on its way, which it often isn’t; they must flee as soon as the quake hits. The Japanese warning system relies not only on tsunameters but also on seismometers (地震测量仪) — a thousand of them ________ the country, the densest network anywhere — combined with a computer model that forecasts the scale of a tsunami from the magnitude (震级) and ________ of the quake.
In March, the system, which is run by the Japan Meteorological Agency (JMA), did not work perfectly. JMA’s initial ________, while the ground was still shaking, put the quake magnitude at 7.9 — but later analysis revealed a quake that, at magnitude 9, was 12 times larger. The tsunami forecast warned of waves of ten feet or more — but they reached 50 feet in Minanisanriku and in some places even ________. But the human ________ to the warning was imperfect as well. “I think this time many people who lived above the high-water mark of the 1960 tsunami didn’t bother to run.” says Jin Sato, mayor of Minanisanriku. “Many of them died.” The town’s seawall, he thinks, also gave people a false sense of ________
1.A.approves | B.rids | C.expects | D.consists |
2.A.broadcasts | B.foresees | C.assigns | D.imposes |
3.A.some | B.a few | C.none | D.others |
4.A.qualified | B.alerted | C.substituted | D.fueled |
5.A.although | B.until | C.as | D.where |
6.A.difficult | B.thoughtful | C.easy | D.pressing |
7.A.alternative | B.perspective | C.repetition | D.resume |
8.A.surprise | B.mistake | C.accident | D.force |
9.A.reference | B.confirmation | C.suggestion | D.expectation |
10.A.undertake | B.multiply | C.deposit | D.blanket |
11.A.location | B.direction | C.territory | D.length |
12.A.note | B.catalogue | C.volume | D.estimate |
13.A.worse | B.larger | C.higher | D.wider |
14.A.schedule | B.scheme | C.monitor | D.response |
15.A.warning | B.security | C.setting | D.responsibility |