ESL970G Advanced Grammar and Editing with Marsha Chan

Nouns, Adjectives, and Noun Phrases Answer Key

Hurricanes, Typhoons, and Cyclones: Nature's Lethal Weapons

Monday, 18 September, 2000, 09:13 GMT 10:13 UK

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/202344.stm

Instructions:

Underline all nouns and noun phrases. With a yellow highlighter pen, highlight the adjectives. With a green highlighter pen, highlight other modifiers of that noun (articles, personal pronouns, nouns, possessive nouns, adverbs). Draw an arrow from each adjective and other modifier to the noun that it modifies.

The first one is done for you as a model. The subject consists of three single nouns: hurricanes, typhoons, and cyclones. They have no modifiers. The complement is a seven-word noun phrase: the worldıs most violent and destructive storms. The noun storm has many modifiers.

Take me to the unmarked article.

In this Answer Key, the nouns are shown in bold.

Hurricanes, typhoons and cyclones are

are the world's most violent and destructive storms.

They are giant whirlwinds where air moves around a centre of low pressure - the eye of the storm - reaching high speeds in circular waves extending 20 or 30 miles from the middle.

The word "hurricane" probably comes from the Mayan storm god Hunraken, or other Caribbean terms for evil spirit and big wind. The terms "hurricane", "typhoon" and "tropical storm" all describe the same type of swirling wind activity.

When cyclonic winds reach speeds of more than 64 kmh, they are officially "tropical storms," and they are assigned a name.

If the winds reach 118 kmh, then they are redefined as hurricanes or typhoons, depending on location.

The storm is a "hurricane" if it is in the North Atlantic Ocean, the Northeast Pacific Ocean east of the dateline, or the South Pacific Ocean east of 160E. Air circulation is counterclockwise in the northern hemisphere and clockwise in the southern hemisphere.

"Typhoons" occur in the Northwest Pacific Ocean west of thedateline.

Tropical storms are the only natural disasters with their own names.

Until 1978, they were given women's names, but then US weather forecasters bowed to political correctness and agreed to alternate them with men's names.

Have you ever wondered how typhoons and hurricanes start?

Tropical cyclones need a warm layer of ocean water and an unstable atmosphere to develop.

Cool ocean winds at low pressure force hot, humid air high into the atmosphere forming a column. Moisture is forced up the column which condenses and releases latent heat energy, the primary source of fuel for tropical cyclones.

At the centre is a calm sunlit eye, measuring tens of kilometres across.

In simple terms, hurricanes are giant machines that convert heat energy from tropical ocean water into wind.

How much harm can they do?

Violent winds, rain, waves, and storm tides make hurricanes one of the most dangerous natural disasters, accounting for an eighth of weather-related deaths.

They have the potential to devastate the world's insurance markets.

A large hurricane can stir up more than a million cubic miles of the atmosphere every second, typically dumping 15-30 cm of rain on landfall.

Some hurricanes bring lots more rainfall and cause major flooding with storm surges and high surf. As they can move rapidly and erratically, the path the winds will take is hard to predict precisely.

Hurricanes also affect the depths of the ocean. In 1975, instruments dropped from research planes in the Gulf of Mexico showed that Hurricane Eloise disturbed the ocean hundreds of feet below the ocean's surface and created underwater waves that persisted for weeks.

Can nature's weapon be stopped?

In 1962 the US government began to look at ways of how to weaken hurricanes, but the project ended without results in 1983.

However, one of the world's leading hurricane scientists, Hugh Willoughby, still believes there just might be a way of disrupting hurricanes.

One idea which scientists are looking at is to put black soot into the air by burning petroleum on ships near a hurricane.

Black absorbs heat from the sun, which would then create updrafts to break up the hurricane's normal wind patterns.

Mr Willoughby has even considered a big tin foil mirror in space to reflect sunlight to heat the ocean in just the right spot to divert a hurricane.

Scientists are taking these ideas seriously because they think if they could cut hurricane winds by 10 percent or 15 percent  it could prevent many billions of dollars of damage.

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