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  3. In most earthquakes the Earth’s crust cracks like porcelain. Stress builds up until a fracture forms at the depth of a few kilom

In most earthquakes the Earth’s crust cracks like porcelain. Stress builds up until a fracture forms at the depth of a few kilom

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问题     In most earthquakes the Earth’s crust cracks like porcelain. Stress builds up until a fracture forms at the depth of a few kilometers and the crust slips to relieve the stress. Some earthquakes, however, take place hundreds of kilometers down in the Earth’s mantle, where high pressure makes rock so ductile that it flows instead of cracking, even under stress severe enough to deform it like putty. How can there be earthquakes at such depths? ’
    That such deep events do occur has been accepted only since 1927, when the seismologist Kiyoo Wadati convincingly demonstrated their existence. Instead of comparing the arrival times of seismic waves at different locations, as earlier researchers had done, Wadati relied on a time difference between the arrival of primary (P)waves and the slower secondary (S) waves. Because P and S waves travel at different but fairly constant speeds;the interval between their arrivals increases in proportion to the distance from the earthquake focus, or a rupture point
    For most earthquakes, Wadati discovered, the interval was quite short near the epicenter, the point on the surface where shaking is the strongest For a few events, however, the delay was long enough at the epicenter. Wadati saw a similar pattern when he analyzed data on the intensity of shaking. Most earthquakes had a small area of intense shaking, which weakened rapidly with increasing distance from the epicenter, but others were characterized by a lower peak intensity, felt over a broader area. Both the P-S intervals and the intensity patterns suggested two kinds of earthquakes: the more common shallow events, in which the focus lay just under the epicenter, and the deep events, with a focus several hundred kilometers down.
    The question remained;how can such quakes occur, given that mantle rock at a depth of more than 50 kilometers is too flexible to store enough stress to fracture? Wadati’s work suggested that deep events occur in areas(now called Wadati-Benioff zones) where one crustal plate is forced under another and descends into the mantle. The descending rock is substantially cooler than the surrounding mantle and hence is less ductile and much more liable to fracture.
The passage is primarily concerned with______.
选项 A、demonstrating why the methods of early seismologists were flawed
B、defending a revolutionary theory about the causes of earthquakes and methods of predicting them
C、discussing the evidence for the existence of deep events and the conditions that allow them to occur
D、comparing the effects of shallow events with those of deep events
答案C
解析 文章内容主要是向读者介绍deep events的知识。Wadati通过对P waves与S waves的研究发现deep events的存在。不同类型的地震其P—S intervals是不同的，因此有了shallow events与deep events的区别。文章也告诉了读者deep events是如何发生的。
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