Built to Sway: teacher key

Japan, grade 10 edition, written for 10th grade. Japan lives on shaky ground, so it measures, simulates and builds for it. Its blossoms, writing, railways and a changing population all have numbers too.

Read the book. Print this page for the key.

Questions and answers

1. Why does Japan have so much earthquake activity?
   • It has many volcanoes only
   • Oceanic plates slide beneath continental plates around it (answer)
   • Its rivers are steep
2. How does Japan's weather agency warn about a tsunami fast?
   • It waits for waves to arrive
   • It asks fishing boats
   • It matches a quake to the closest of many stored simulations (answer)
3. What is the main goal of the 1981 building-code amendment for the strongest earthquakes?
   • That a building should simply not collapse (answer)
   • That no building is taller than 50 meters
   • That windows never break
4. Why can scientists use Kyoto's old flowering dates?
   • They come from satellites
   • They come from forecasts
   • They come from documents and diaries over centuries (answer)
5. What does the word magnitude mean?
   • The height of a wave
   • A measure of the energy an earthquake releases (answer)
   • The speed of a train

Words

• tsunami: giant sea wave
• magnitude: quake energy size
• seismic: of earthquakes
• clones: exact copies
• haiku: short poem