Vocabulary

Directions: Scan the following passage and find the words which have roughly the same meanings as those given below. The number in the brackets after each word definition refers to the number of paragraph in which the target word is. 

     Geophysicist Dr. Andrea Donnellan of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., remembers the morning of January 17, 1994, like few others. Like millions of other Southern California residents, she was shaken from her sleep in her normally tranquil foothill community home as a large earthquake caused a mountain, located just 30 miles away, to grow nearly 15 inches higher, all in a matter of seconds.
     “Large earthquakes are always disconcerting,” she said. “Being a geophysicist I was immediately interested in how large the earthquake was and where it had occurred.”
     Within minutes, news reports confirmed that Los Angeles’ San Fernando Valley had taken a direct hit from an earthquake comparable in size to the damaging 1972 San Fernando earthquake. More than 60 people were killed in each earthquake and thousands were injured. The latter event became one of the costliest natural disasters ever to strike the United States. Only the pre—dawn time of day and the fact that it was a holiday kept the death toll from being much higher.
     Less than two months before that fateful day, Donnellan and colleagues from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology had published a landmark paper in the journal Nature on ground distortion north of LA’s San Fernando Valley. Six years of relatively sparse data from a fledgling network of Global Positioning System (GPS) deformation monitors, that had been developed and installed around Southern California by scientists at JPL and other organizations, had detected that Earth’s crust was being squeezed closed across the Ventura Basin. The data showed the area’s faults were accumulating strain, and they gave the scientists clear indications of the style and relative size of an earthquake that might strike there, even though the faults there do not all break the surface. They placed no time frame on when such a temblor might occur, however.