1. You are going to read about three famous natural disasters below.

For each story, write a title. The titles should include the kind of
natural disaster, the city or country, and the year.

Story #1 Title:

I want to describe my experience to you about a disaster to hit my country in

2004. It was a beautiful day, and my parents were at work, but my sister and I
were cleaning up our home with my aunt, who was taking care of us. The night
before, we felt a terrible, large earthquake that damaged much of our house.
Because of this, we couldn't sleep and spent most of the night frightened.  

At around 9 AM in the morning, we were arranging the furniture on our balcony

when my sister started to notice strange waves in the ocean. Our balcony has a
beautiful view of the ocean and we always watched the waves in the evening
after dinner. Suddenly, a huge wave appeared south of our home. It was
coming straight in our direction. We ran out of our house and looked for high
land. The large wave hit the beach and then our home, and it immediately
destroyed our house. Luckily, we had climbed up to our neighbour's roof and
we were safe. We later found out that the tsunami had killed nearly 230,000
people in over 14 countries, including Indonesia.  

Story #2 Title:

In 1989, I was watching baseball in my apartment. I was watching the World

Series, which is a yearly event with the year's two best teams. The game was
in San Francisco and their team was playing Oakland, which is actually only 30
minutes from San Francisco. At around 5 PM, the picture on the TV started to
shake, and the baseball players looked frightened. The announcers on TV said
that an earthquake was shaking the ground and suddenly the picture went
dead.  
Later, while I was watching the evening news, I found out that most of Northern
California had experienced a large earthquake. Many people had died in San
Francisco, which was near the centre of the quake. A popular bridge had been
destroyed as well as many homes and other buildings. About three or four days
later, they finished playing the game, but nobody was really thinking about
baseball in San Francisco anymore.

Story #3 Title:

In my home city of New Orleans, most of my city was underwater on a summer

day in 2005. It was a terrible experience. It happened because of a large
hurricane that had hit the area two days before. The hurricane was named
Katrina and had destroyed many parts of Florida and Louisiana when it hit my
city.

The reason for the flooding was that New Orleans is actually below sea level.
Our city is very close to the coast and we have walls that usually stop large
waves. Unfortunately, the waves caused by Katrina broke most of these walls
and much of the water entered our city. I later heard that 80 percent of New
Orleans had been underwater for two weeks. Many people died, and food and
water were hard to find. Many homes were destroyed and had to be rebuilt.
Even now in 2015, you can still see a lot of the damage caused by the flood.
2. Complete the sentences in either the Past Simple, Continuous, or
Perfect:

a. The family couldn’t sleep because                    .

b. They did not die in the water because                    .

When the disaster happened,                     because their parents were at

c.
work.

The writer of the second story                     when the earthquake

d.
happened.

e. The writer found out many people had died in the earthquake                    .

f. Three or four days after the earthquake happened,                    .

In the summer of 2005, most of New Orleans was flooded because

g.
                   .

h. Before the hurricane hit New Orleans,                    .

                    because they had broken the walls that usually stop the
i.
ocean’s waves.