文档介绍：全国职称英语等级考试理工类(B级)试题
第1部分：词汇选项(第1-15题，每题1分，共15分)
下面每个句子中均有1个词或短语画有底横线。请为每处画线部分确定1个意义最为靠近旳选项。
1 The city centre wer felt a quake before. Oklahoma is not an area of the country famous for its quakes. If you watch the news on TV, you see reports about all sorts of natural disasters —hurricanes, tornadoes, flooding and wildfires, to name a few. But the most dangerous type of natural disaster, and also the most unpredictable, is the earthquake.
Researchers at the . Geological Survey estimate that several million earthquakes rattle the globe each year. That may sound scary, but people don’t feel many of the tremors because they happen in remote and unpopulated regions. Many quakes happen under the ocean, and others have a very small magnitude, or shaking intensity.
A magnitude earthquake that struck central Virginia the afternoon of August 23, , was felt from central Georgia to southeastern Canada. In many urban areas, including Washington, ., and New York City (Wall Street shown), people crowded the streets while engineers inspected buildings. Credit: Wikimedia/Alex Tabak
Scientists know about small, remote quakes only because of very sensitive electronic devices called seismometers. These devices detect and measure the size of ground vibrations produced by earthquakes. Altogether, USGS researchers use seismometers to identify and locate about 20,000 earthquakes each year.
Although earthquakes can happen anywhere in the world, really big quakes occur only in certain areas. The largest ones register a magnitude 8 or higher and happen, on average, only once each year. Such big ones typically occur along the edges of Earth’s tectonic plates.
Tectonic plates are huge pieces of Earth’s crust, sometimes many kilometers thick. These plates cover our planet’s surface like a jigsaw puzzle. Often, jagged edges of these plates temporarily lock together. When plates jostle and scrape past each other earthquakes occur. On average, tectonic plates move