A terrible storm destroyed fourteen homes. Seven others were so badly damaged that their owners had to leave them, and fifteen others had broken windows or broken roofs. One person was killed, several were badly hurt and taken to the hospital, and a number of other people received smaller hurt. Altogether over two hundred people were homeless after the storm.

A farmer, Mr Tan, said that the storm began early in the morning and lasted for over an hour.

“I was eating with my wife and children，” he said, “when we heard a loud noise. A few minutes later our house fell down on top of us. We tried our best to climb out but then I saw that one of my children was missing. I went back inside and found him safe but very frightened.”

Mrs Woo said that her husband had just left for work when she felt that her house was moving. She ran outside at once with her children.

“There was no time to take anything，” she said. “A few minutes later, the roof came down.”

Soldiers helped to take people out of the flooded area and the welfare department brought them food, clothes and shelters.

The sound of leaves underfoot is usually associated with autumn. But this year, it was the soundtrack to summer walks across Europe, as maximum temperature records fell and the continent suffered its worst drought in 500 years.

The drought had been building for months after a dry winter and spring, but it was worse by a series of fierce heatwaves over the summer, says Sim on Parry at the UK Centre for Ecology &Hydrology. In France, nuclear power plants were forced to reduce their output as low river flows meant there wasn’t enough water to cool their reactors. Water levels on the Rhine river dropped so far that ships loaded with goods in Germany and the Netherlands, including coal and petrol, were unable to travel. Besides, farmers saw crops wither(枯萎). Harvests of soya-beans and sunflower seeds were predicted to fall by between12 and 16 percent.

This was a crisis caused in large part by climate change, says Richard Allan, who is also at the University of Reading. “Warming due to human-caused climate change made this event much more extreme,” he says. Studies suggest that the drought was made at least 20 times more likely by global warming.

However, that missing rainfall ends up somewhere, says Peter Gleick at the Pacific Institute in California. This year’s disastrous floods in countries including Australia and Pakistan are the “flip side” of the droughts, he says. “The droughts and the extreme floods that we are seeing are tied together, and are part and parcel of the broader challenge of climate change,” says Gleick.

In the wake of a drought, it is critical that nature gets time to recover. But for Europe, this was the second severe drought in four years. “My grass has already recovered from this summer... but if I had a tree that survived it, that would take 10 years or more to get back to a normal state,” says Niko Wanders at Utrecht University in the Netherlands.

Fire extinguishers are marked according to the kind of fire on which they should be used. Using the wrong type of extinguisher can be dangerous and make things worse.

Type A extinguishers are used for fires on paper, cloth, wood, rubber, many plastics and so on. These types of fires usually leave ashes when they burn, so use Type A extinguishers for fire s that leave ashes.

Type B extinguishers are used for burning liquids, such as oil, gasoline, and paints. These substances often come in barrel-shaped (桶形的) containers, so use Type B extinguishers for such barrels.

Type C extinguishers are used for electrical fires. Electricity travels in a circuit (电路) , so use Type C extinguishers for circuits.

Remember, A Is for Ashes, B is for Barrels, and C I s for Circuits. Make sure you have the correct type of fire extinguisher before you try to use it.

To help you remember how to use a fire extinguisher, learn PAPS. PAPS stands for Pull, Aim, Press, and Sweep.

Pull the pin (销) at the top of the extinguisher cylinder (圆筒) .

Aim the nozzle (喷嘴) at the base of the fire.

Press the handle.

Sweep the spray (喷雾) from side-to-side at the fire’s base until it goes out.