The day began like any other on Goldshore Beach. People were walking, running or simply sitting on the sandy beach, 【小题1】 (enjoy) the warm sea air and the soft wind that brushed their hair 【小题2】 Sabrina, one of the happy 【小题3】 (tour), noticed something odd. She had just 【小题4】 (learn) about tsunamis in a Geography lesson. 【小题5】 immediately occurred to her that these were signs of 【小题6】 approaching tsunami.

Sabrina was 【小题7】 (frighten), but she soon kept her head. She warned her parents 【小题8】 the danger, though at first they just thought she was joking. However, Sabrina was certain that a terrible disaster was on its way and kept asking her parents 【小题9】 (talk) to a safety officer. To her great relief, the officer immediately realized the coming danger. The beach 【小题10】 (clear) of people rapidly, just before the huge waves crashed into the coast.

A violent earthquake struck Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region on Monday 24 February, 2003, 【小题1】killed as many as 240 people and injured 600,【小题2】(leave) tens of thousands of more homeless.

Luckily, the earthquake happened in the daytime after people had already left home【小题3】work or school. Many people【小题4】( save )because they were outside. Fortunately, all the school children were taking part in 【小题5】 ceremony in the street and many adults were working in the fields when it struck.

“My family had just finished breakfast when the house started shaking and we heard a loud noise. I 【小题6】(immediate) pushed my grandchildren out of the door to safety before the house fell down.” said a local woman. Sadly, her neighbors were 【小题7】(little) lucky: both parents died while their three children were seriously injured.

Fortunately, rescue workers 【小题8】 (arrive) very quickly. By Tuesday most of the injured had received medical care or had gone to hospital, and by Wednesday thousands of tens, camp beds and warm quilts had arrived and all the【小题9】(survivor) had somewhere to sleep. The next step was【小题10】( bring ) drinking water supply and electricity back to normal as soon as possible.

Strange things were happening in the countryside of northeastern Hebei. For several days, the water in the village wells rose and fell, rose and fell. There were deep cracks 【小题1】 appeared in the well walls. At least one well had some smelly gas 【小题2】 (come) out of it. Chickens and even pigs were too nervous 【小题3】 ( eat), and dogs refused to go inside buildings. Mice ran out of the fields looking for places to hide, and fish jumped out of the water. At about 3:00 a.m., on 28 July 1976, bright lights were seen in the sky outside the city of Tangshan and loud noises 【小题4】 (hear). But the city’s one million people were asleep as usual that night.

At 3:42 a. m., everything began to shake. It seemed as 【小题5】 the world were coming to an end! Eleven kilometres directly below the city, one of the most deadly 【小题6】 (earthquake) of the 20th century had begun, a quake that even caused damage more than 150 kilometres away in Beijing. Nearly one third of the whole nation felt it! A huge crack, eight kilometres 【小题7】 (length) and 30 metres wide, cut across houses, roads, and waterways. Hard hills of rock became rivers of dirt. In less than one minute, a large city lay 【小题8】 ruins. Two thirds of the people who lived there were dead or 【小题9】 (injure). Thousands of children were left without parents. The number of people who were killed or 【小题10】 (bad) injured in the quake was more than 400,000.