Humans are forever forgetting that they cant control nature. Exactly twenty years ago, the Time magazine cover story announced【M1】______ that "scientists are on the verge of being able to predict the time, place and even the size of earthquakes". The people of quake-ruined Kobe (神户)learned last week how wrong that assertion was. All of the【M2】______ methods raised two decades ago have succeeded. Even now, scientists have yet to discover a uniform. warning signal that precedes all quakes, let alone any sign would tell whether the coming quake is mild or a【M3】______ killer. Earthquake formation can be triggered by many factors, says Hiroo Kanamori, a seismologist at the California Institute of Technology. So, finding one all-purpose warning sign is impossible. One reason: Quakes start deeply in the earth, so scientists cant study【M4】______ them directly. If a quake precursor were found, it would still be impossible to warn humans at advance of all dangerous quakes.【M5】______ Places like Japan and California are full with hundreds, if not【M6】______ thousands, of minor faults(断层). It is impossible to place monitoring instruments on all of them And these inconspicuous sites can be just as deadly their better-known cousins like the San Andreas.【M7】______ Both the Kobe and the 1994 Northridge quakes occurred in small【M8】______ faults. Prediction would be less important if scientist could easily build structures to withstand tremors. While seismic engineering has been【M9】______ improved dramatically in the passed 10 to 15 years, every new quake【M10】______ reveals unexpected weaknesses in "quake-resistant" structures, says Terry Tullis, a geophysicist at Brown University.
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