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CELPIP Practice Reading: Reading for Information ID: #60160 Easy Unexpected waves: the tsunamis after the 2010 Haiti earthquake

Read the following passage.

A. On 12 January 2010, a magnitude 7.0 earthquake struck the Port-au-Prince region of Haiti. Shortly afterwards, the sea began to move along the coast. At Grand Goave, on the Bay of Port-au-Prince, a man and two boys who had stayed on the shore to watch were killed by a wave, and several homes near the water were swept away. Many survivors of the quake gathered on beaches to look at the waves as a kind of show instead of running inland. Near the border with the Dominican Republic, fishermen took photos and videos as the sea drew back.

B. Few people expected a tsunami from this earthquake. It happened where the Caribbean and North America plates meet, and this boundary is dominated by sideways, or strike-slip, motion. Faults of this type rarely produce much uplift or a tsunami. The quake was also smaller than the size that worries tsunami experts, who generally become concerned above magnitude 7.5. A regional warning centre recorded a wave of only 12 centimetres at Santo Domingo and cancelled its tsunami watch. In Haiti itself, the alert arrived by telephone at a police station that had already collapsed.

C. Several weeks later, Hermann Fritz, a coastal engineer at the Georgia Institute of Technology, travelled around the Haitian coast with four Haitian colleagues to collect evidence before it disappeared. Satellite images showed the team where waves had probably struck, and at those sites they found sand deposits, debris and scars on trees. The waves had averaged about three metres high along the southern coast of Hispaniola and the Bay of Port-au-Prince. At least one reached land about 100 kilometres from the epicentre, the point on the surface above where the quake began. Fritz also reported that Haiti had no tsunami warning signs on its beaches, unlike some other Caribbean countries.

D. Exactly how a quake of this kind made such waves is still being worked out. A team that surveyed the area onshore and offshore found that modest uplift played a part, but that submarine landslides caused the most severe waves locally. Early reports placed the earthquake on the Enriquillo-Plantain Garden fault, but another group later showed that it ruptured a separate, unmapped fault. Landslide tsunamis may strike this area about ten times more often than global estimates suggest. Yet the written record of Caribbean tsunamis is short, and a NOAA researcher said scientists do not know all of the trends.

E. Not given in any of the above paragraphs.

Decide which paragraph, A to D, has the information given in each statement below. Select E if the information is not given in any of the paragraphs.

 - 1. Damage to the bark of trees helped researchers see where the water had reached.

 - 2. Three people lost their lives because they waited by the water to see a wave.

 - 3. An engineer and four partners from Haiti went along the coastline looking for proof of the waves.

 - 4. After the survey, notices about the danger were placed on Haitian beaches.

 - 5. The shaking came from a fault that no one had drawn on a map before.

 - 6. People who fish for a living recorded the water as it pulled away from land.

 - 7. A message about the danger was sent to a building that had fallen down.

 - 8. The survey along the coastline lasted about three weeks.

 - 9. At least one wave hit land around a hundred kilometres from where the shaking started.

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