Unit 4 (midterm)

At present, the world population of humans is growing at a rate of ________% per year.

1.2%

Using the rule of 70, money invested at 7% annual interest will double in __________ years.

10

In the last 50 years of the 20th century, world population grew from ______ billion to over 6 billion.

2.5

Which of the following does NOT have a significant convergent margin?

African Plate

Which of the following is NOT a divergent margin?

Aleutian Island Arc

Easter Island is _________________.

An isolated volcanic island, located in the Pacific Ocean

Based on data for the period from 1970 to 2012, the continent of _______________ experienced the greatest loss of life from natural disasters.

Asia

In the last two or three centuries ___________________.

Birth rates have changed little, while death rates have plunged

Moving progressively away from the ridges, the ocean water depths increase systematically with seafloor age due to all but which of the following?

Cooling and contraction of the oceanic crust with a resultant increase in density

The _________ century saw many of the intellectual advances that set the stage for the present phase of cultural change, with the causes of many diseases being recognized, and the principles of public health being established.

Eighteenth

In igneous rocks such as granite, S-waves travel about 1.7 times faster than P-waves.

False

Spreading ridges produce the largest number of great earthquakes (magnitude 8 or higher).

False

The annual likelihood of a tornado that kills 10 people is less than that of an earthquake killing the same number of people.

False

The biggest disasters are from great earthquakes occurring at great depths.

False

The point where a fault first ruptures underground is known as the epicenter.

False

The primary cause of deaths in earthquakes in modern times is people being swallowed alive by the Earth, rather than by building collapse.

False

Transform faults have mostly vertical displacement rather than horizontal displacement.

False

P-waves can travel through ________________.

Gases, liquids, and solids

The _________ waves' motion is similar to S waves, except it is from side-to-side in a horizontal plane roughly parallel to the Earth's surface.

Love

Despite the profound effects that earthquakes have had on civilizations for so many centuries, systematic scientific observations were not made until the early _________ century, when good descriptions were made of earthquake effects on the land.

Nineteenth

All of the continents were once combined into a single supercontinent called ________________.

Pangaea

The ________ waves advance in a backward-rotating, elliptical motion.

Rayleigh

________ faults are commonly found at areas of plate convergence where subduction or continental collision occurs.

Reverse

The strike-slip San Andreas Fault in California is a _______ fault more than 800 miles long.

Right-lateral

Which of the following wave types travels slowest through rock?

Surface waves

The frequency of a wave is __________________.

The number of waves passing a given point per unit of time

First-order analysis of a seismogram record allows seismologists to do all but which of the following?

To develop a Modified Mercalli Intensity map

Which of the following disasters has the highest probability of causing a "10-fatality event" each year?

Tornado

In 1620, Francis Bacon of England noted the parallelism of the Atlantic coastlines of South America and Africa and suggested that these continents had once been joined.

True

The Dead Sea fault zone is an Eastern Hemisphere analogue of the San Andreas Fault in California.

True

The North Anatolian fault in Turkey is a 1400 km-long fault zone made of numerous subparallel faults that split and combine, bend and straighten, and there is reason to expect major earthquakes to occur progressively farther to the west, ever closer to Istanbul.

True

The compressional movements at subduction zones and continent-continent collisions generate the largest tectonic earthquakes and they affect the widest areas.

True

The deadliest earthquake in history occurred in 1556 when about 830,000 Chinese were killed in and near Xi'an on the banks of the mighty Huang River.

True

The deadliest earthquake in recent times occurred in 1976 in Tangshan, China, causing the deaths of at least 240,000 people.

True

The velocity of an S-wave depends on the density and resistance to shearing of materials.

True

The greatest earthquakes in the world occur _____________.

Where plates collide with each other

The slide-past motions of long transform faults occur in all but which of the following?

Where the Indian subcontinent touches Asia

The time needed for a typical atom in an oceanic plate to complete a plate-tectonic cycle is ____________.

in excess of 250 million years

Three basic classes of collisions include all but which of the following?

mantle plate vs. lithospheric plate

If sea-floor spreading occurs at a constant rate, the widths of magnetized seafloor strips have _____ ratios as the lengths of time between successive reversals of the Earth's magnetic field

the same