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Humans are forever forgetting that they can't control naturE.Exactly 20 years ago, a Time magazine cover story announced that 'scientists are on the verge of being able to predict the time, place, and even the size of earthquakes.' The people of the quake-hit area, Kobe learned last week how wrong that the claim was.
Humans are forever forgetting that they can't control naturE.Exactly 20 years ago, a Time magazine cover story announced that 'scientists are on the verge of being able to predict the time, place, and even the size of earthquakes.' The people of the quake-hit area, Kobe learned last week how wrong that the claim was.
None of the methods worked out two decades ago can give a uniform. warning before the quakes, let alone discover any sign that would tell whether the coming earthquake is mild or a killer. Earthquake formation can be triggered by many factors, says Hiroo Kanamori, an expert at the California Institute of Technology. So, finding one all-purpose warning sign is impossiblE.One reason is that earthquakes start deep in the earth, so scientists can't study them directly. If a quake precursor were found, it would still be impossible to warn humans in advance of all dangerous quakes. Places like Japan and California are full of hundreds, if not thousands, of minor faults.
Prediction would be less important if scientists could easily build structures to withstand tremors. While the science has improved dramatically in the past 10 to 15 years, every new quake reveals unexpected weakness in quake-resistant structures, says Terry Tullis, a geophysicist at Brown University.
In Kobe, for example, a highway that opened only last year was damageD.In the Northridge earthquake, on the other hand, well-built structures generally did not collapsE.
A recent report in Science adds yet more anxiety about life on the faulty lines. Researchers ran computer simulations(模拟) to see how quake-resistant buildings would fall in a moderate-size earthquake, taking into account that much of a quake's energy travels in a large 'pulse' of focused shaking. The results: both steel-framE.buildings and buildings that sit on insulating(隔离的) rubber pads suffered severe damagE.
More research will help experts design stronger structures and possibly find quake precursors, but it is still a certainty that the next earthquake will prove once again that every fault cannot be monitored and every high way cannot be completely quake prooF.
We can infer from the first paragraph that______.
A.scientists can never predict earthquakes
B.the ability to predict earthquakes is overstated
C.quite a few scientific claims are groundless
D.earthquake predictions are accurate
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