Floods, earthquake, famine, drought, disease, emergency, refugees, aid, charity, injuries

1. The crops have failed again and …………… is widespread.

2. The latest San Francisco ………….. measured 4.5 on the Richter scale.

3. In case of ……………. break the glass and push the button.

4. Half a million……………..have now crossed the border in an attempt to find food.

5. I never give to …………….. . I think it should be the government’s responsibility.

6. The present government has given more in ……………to needy countries than any other in living memory.

7. Many children have suffered terrible………….as a result of the fighting.

8. A new…………..has been discovered which causes partial blindness and skin problems.

9. There has been a ……………in certain parts of the country due to the lack of rain.

10. There has been so much rain that some rivers have burst their banks and there have been……………… .

Activity 17. Three groups of students each read a different article about asteroids and meteors. Then they prepare and present a talk or radio show, which can be serious or amusing, about asteroids or space exploration.

Group A

Ring around the Earth

There is undoubted risk that an asteroid will one day strike this planet and when it does the damage would be appalling. It is precisely this danger that has led the US Congress to instruct NASA, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, to establish the Near – Earth Asteroid Detection Workshop. The Workshop has recommended that a network of six observatories be set up around the Earth to provide early warning of a potential asteroid strike. The network would take between 10 and 15 years to plot the movements of the 2.000 asteroids thought to move near the Earth’s orbit around the Sun. Only about 100 of these have been charted so far. At a cost of $60 million the network would track asteroids in their orbits and begin predicting their movements around the Sun and particularly where and when they would cross the Earth’s orbit. If a collision with an asteroid were predicted early enough, the impact might be prevented by firing nuclear weapons at it. Large asteroids narrowly missing the Earth have been observed over the past few years. In March 1989, one asteroid half a mile wide was observed passing within 400,000 miles, which in astronomical terms is a very close shave indeed.

If such an object struck the Earth on a continent, it would drill right through to the molten magma layer and spew out billions of tons of debris with the force of million-megaton bomb. It would certainly suffocate most life forms on the Earth. If it landed in an ocean, it would create the mother of all tidal waves that would cause equal havoc.

Group B

Life destroyed by asteroids

All life on the surface of the Earth has been destroyed at least once be asteroids, claims a team of NASA scientists, and they suspect that a giant crater in Mexico may have been caused by the asteroid, which wiped out the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. During the 1^st thousand million years of history, asteroids frequently crashed into the Earth, the largest of them bringing unimaginable devastation; causing fireballs the size of continents and boiling away the first 1.000 feet of water from the ocean. All life as we know it, including humans, may therefore be descended from the primitive organisms that were protected from destruction by several miles of ocean water above them. Such hypotheses come from studying not the Earth, where in time the atmosphere and life cover over the damage, but the moon where craters as much as thousands of miles wide remain unchanged for thousands of millions of years. Identifying similar craters on the Earth is made difficult by their sheer size. Under investigation as possible craters are Hudson Bay, the Gulf of Mexico and the Bay of Bengal. More recent impacts include the meteorite, which fell on Tunguska, Siberia in 1908 with the force of 1.000 Hiroshima-sized atom bombs, and destroyed 750 square miles of forest.

Group C