A、Science. B、Finance. C、Politics. D、Culture. C

Now, listen to Part Two of the interview.
W: Interesting. So, as you say, there are many poorly built houses in these regions, so they might be expected to be damaged in an earthquake. But in your paper you bring up this point that this is now statistically quantifiable. Can you talk about that?
M: Yes. There are two groups who have focused on attempting to characterize the fatality count within minutes of an earthquake, and it’s done like this.(6)When an earthquake occurs it takes about 20 minutes or 25 minutes for the world seismometers to register that information, but once it’s done it only takes a computer a few seconds to calculate its depth, its magnitude, its position very precisely. And from that information you can get another computer program going that takes information about building fragility, and within 30 seconds of knowing where the earthquake occurred, you can usually predict the number of people killed or injured or even costs due to the damage. This of course is an appalling thing for us to be able to do because people on the ground in these earthquakes have no idea what’s hit them until several weeks have elapsed until the actual numbers come out. Why can we do this? Because we know from the past 10 - 20 years of earthquakes exactly what happens in a built-up urban environment and we know something about the fragility of the buildings there, so we can actually do these calculations. I think this is one of the saddest things that clever seismologists have been able to do, and it’s of course not their fault.(7)It’s entirely something to do with the ethics of building styles, or the construction practices of the countries where these earthquakes occur.
W: But is there anything being done to improve conditions of these buildings or prevent deaths in, say, Iran or in some of these other countries?
M: OK. If I answer that honestly you won’t like it. The bottom line is everyone is really concerned when 5,000 people are killed in a village or a town from an earthquake that wasn’t expected, or was expected and the people will blame each other for why buildings fell down. When an earthquake occurs people are concerned about the deaths, and there is a period of maybe a year before people completely forget about it. And during that year there’s a frenzy of activity to fix buildings, to start retrofitting things, to build new schools. And that’s great. But there’s no attempt to fix the problem in the next village where the next earthquake will occur.
W: Right.(8/9)So basically the science is available to help make the predictions, and you can even use technology to get the building codes to the right level, but you actually have to have the political will and the infrastructure to build to those codes.
M: Absolutely. There is no point in having a building code if it’s not applied, and this is only too common.(10)You may recall last month the collapse of a factory in Bangladesh? No earthquake. The wind wasn’t blowing. It just fell. And that is appalling. It should never have been committed to be constructed in that way. And, unfortunately, we live in a world where there are many buildings that are just waiting to be shaken a little by quite a modest earthquake and they will collapse. And we’ll only find out about them when they do collapse.
W: Alright. Well, Roger Bilham, thank you so much for talking with me.
M: Thank you.
This is the end of Part Two of the interview.
Questions 6 to 10 are based on what you have just heard.
6. Which of the following best describes the steps of figuring out the casualty of earthquakes?
7. What is the reason of so many deaths in earthquakes?
8. According to the interview, what is the biggest obstacle of improving the buildings in South Central Asia?
9. According to the interviewee, what should be done to prevent deaths?
10. What happened in Bangladesh last month?