New York by Gas-Light Essays

New York by Gas-Light Essays New York by Gas-Light Essay New York by Gas-Light Essay New York by Gas-Light and Awful Disclosures can be called a number of things, but â€Å"earnest reform tracts† is probably something that should be excluded from the list. New York by Gas-Light has one critical redeeming value: George Foster had a magnificent subject that had largely been unexploited by other journalists in his day: New York City.   New York had grown at an breakneck pace, becoming in just a few decades the first true American metropolis.   At the same time, Americans’ appetite to know about this strange, somewhat sordid place had also grown, and Foster was entirely willing to satisfy the public’s desire to know.   Reading through his fifteen sketches, one finds descriptions intended to arouse and perhaps to shock his readers, but there is no serious call to clean up the vice of the city. Consider a few examples: female prostitution is invariably the result of man’s individual villainy in seducing and betraying the pure being who trusts her destiny to his keeping – or of the monstrous crime of society which dooms its daughters to degradation, want and misery from which no virtuous effort of theirs can ever rescue them.   Let society heed this one simply truth, and apply a thorough and efficient remedy, by furnishing the means of comfortable and happy existence to women who would be virtuous and exclude from its presence all men who are guilty of seduction or libertinism, or who have trifled with the sacred affection of woman, in any form.   The nine-tenths of all crime and suffering will be at once abolished from the face of the earth.   But this is something to be prayed fro rather than hoped for. Indeed, given the prominence that Foster attained through his writing, one wonders how fervently he prayed that these conditions end.   Describing â€Å"Five Points,† he waxes eloquent: This is indeed a sad sight, an awful sight a sight to make the blood slowly congeal and the heart to grow fearful and cease its beatings.   Here, whence these streets diverge in dark and endless paths, whose steps take hold on hell here is the very type and physical semblance, in fact, of hell itself. Foster gives no suggestion that he want to remedy the vices he found in such places as Five Points.   Given the success that he enjoyed with New York by Gas-Light, it seems unlikely he did. New York by Gas-Light is not entirely accurate.   Foster took a number of journalistic liberties in his writing, but it can still be classified as non-fiction.   That cannot be said of Awful Disclosures, which was a calculated fraud.   Maria Monk was never a nun and was never in the Hotel Dieu Nunnery.   Monk had suffered a brain injury as a child, and she apparently could not differentiate between reality and elaborate fictions.   She collaborated with several vehemently anti-Catholic Protestant ministers, to produce a book that described the nunnery in Montreal as an elaborate prison in which nuns were held as slaves for priests. While there is the absence of explicit details about sex acts that might be expected for a piece of this period, there are many details of sadistic punishments meted out against nuns for the slightest resistance.   Infanticide is described in some detail, this being the supposed means of disposing of any accidental children born of the liaisons of the lascivious priests with their sexual servitors. (Monk, 99-101, 128)   Bondage and gagging are described as punishments. (Monk, 105-06, 114-15)   In a remarkably cold scene, she describes the murder of a nun and the dumping of her body into a lime pit. (Monk, 59-65) While Foster wrote New York by Gas-Light as a profit-making venture, the purpose for creating the elaborate hoax of Awful Disclosures is more devious.   The book was created as an attack on Catholicism.   In the 1830s, nativist Protestants felt themselves threatened by Catholicism.   To counter this, and following the literary success of Six Months in a Convent in 1832, Maria Monk’s backers created their pseudo-pornographic account of life in a Montreal nunnery.   The book has since been exposed as completely fictional.   An investigator who was enter the Hotel Dieu Nunnery reported that Maria Monk’s description of the arrangement of the rooms (Monk, 35-40) was hopelessly inaccurate. (Schultz, xv-xix)   As inquiries continued, it was discovered that Maria Monk had never been a nun, had apparently been confined for a considerable time to an asylum, and was a common prostitute rather than the victim of priestly sexual abuse.   Nevertheless, Awful Disclosures remained a remarkable bestseller for many years. (Schultz, xviii-xix)

Five Ways to Write Faster

Five Ways to Write Faster Five Ways to Write Faster Five Ways to Write Faster By Ali Hale Whether you need to clear a backlog of emails, write an important document at work, finish a short story, or do your homework, spending hours staring at a blank screen and struggling to come up with words won’t help. If you know you could get twice as much done if only you could write faster, try some of the following methods. Don’t worry about the quality of your first draft Whether you’re writing fiction or non-fiction, many experts recommend just getting the first draft done before starting to edit. That means keeping the momentum going as you write, rather than going back to change words or delete sentences. If you’re a perfectionist and write slowly because you worry about getting every little detail right the first time round, giving yourself the freedom to produce a â€Å"rubbish first draft† can triple your writing speed. Once you’re done, go back and edit: often, you’ll be surprised that your first draft really isn’t too bad! In his book Do It Tomorrow (which I strongly recommend for anyone who struggles to manage their time and attention), Mark Forster recommends writing a series of quick drafts: When I first learnt the techniqute of writing in a series of rapid drafts, my first draft would usually consist of nothing more than a few words jotted down. My second draft would add a bit more and I would go on revising it until I had it in the form I wanted. There are two great advantages to doing it this way. First of all it gets rid of the perfectionist feeling that it has to be got right first time. If I think a sentence is a bit clumsy, what does it matter? There’ll be another draft along in a moment. The second advantage is that engaging with the material in this way allows new thoughts and insights to appear. Outline the piece before starting With bigger projects, it’s easy to get stuck because you’ve come to a standstill or gone off on a tangent. Jot down some notes before you begin: that might be subheadings for a blog post or article, paragraphs for an essay, or plot points for a short story. Type these onto your computer screen – you’ll no longer be staring at a blank document, and seeing the next subheading or paragraph point ahead will help keep you on track. Set a timer for ten minutes and write non-stop until it goes off Have you noticed how much faster you write when you need to finish something before a set time (perhaps lunch, or an essay deadline)? It’s amazing how much your brain can focus when you’ve only got a few minutes. Mark Forster calls this the â€Å"end effect† – speeding up at the end of a piece of work – and recommends using a timer to produce it consistently. Challenge yourself to see how much you can produce in ten minutes. Do your research and preparation separately from the writing Something that can really slow things down is stopping to look up a fact, find a quote, or check a figure. When you write the outline for your piece (see #2), you should have a good idea of what references you’ll need to make. Look these up before you start writing, and have them all to hand. Alternatively, if the process of writing sparks off ideas of websites, books or people you want to refer to, don’t stop to find them part-way through writing the piece. Leave a note in the text to remind yourself of what you want to include; you might want to highlight this in some way so you don’t forget to go back and put it in! For example, in the first draft of this article, I wrote [Quote from Mark Forster on drafting process] and looked it up when I revised the first draft. The same applies if you’re unsure of how to spell a word, or if you can’t quite think of the right phrase: highlight it in some way, and come back to it once the first draft is complete. Turn off distractions (instant messenger, Twitter, email.) If you’re constantly interrupted by friends wanting to chat on instant messenger, by incoming emails, by new posts coming through to your RSS reader – turn everything off. I can write at least twice as fast – and often even faster – without any distractions. You might think it only takes a few seconds to read each message, but every time you turn your attention away from what you’re writing, you lose momentum. I’m great at procrastinating when I should be writing and so I write most of my blog posts first thing in the morning, before I even connect my computer to the internet. This also helps with #4 – I’m not tempted to stop and search for some missing piece of information on Google every few minutes. Have you got any great tips on speeding up your writing? Can you dash off an essay in an hour, or race through your inbox with ease? Let us know what tips and tricks you’ve discovered – or, alternatively, if you’re a slow writer, tell us where you think you’re going wrong! Want to improve your English in five minutes a day? Get a subscription and start receiving our writing tips and exercises daily! Keep learning! Browse the Writing Basics category, check our popular posts, or choose a related post below:English Grammar 101: All You Need to KnowWhenever vs. When EverHow Do You Determine Whether to Use Who or Whom?

Stereo Field Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 4750 words

Stereo Field - Essay Example One of the radical changes in music production was marked through the development of computer music that involved pre-recorded media, speakers and stereos. Thus, the association between the music creation and physical human movement got disrupted through the use of computer that brought a type of non-instrumental composition in addition to the music production functions such as synthesis, recording and sequencing. However, the link between music and physical human movement has once again revived in the realm of computer music due to the use of latest sensors and the evolution of custom interfaces. The real time and highly interactive technologies allow computer music to extend itself to the physical world of human movement and thus, open the gate towards the creation of extremely imaginative alternative musical instruments such as the hyper instruments (HI’s) that were introduced by Tod Machover. Such interactive music systems offer limitless possibilities. Conventional instru ments are highly interactive systems as they respond immediately to a specific physical action with a corresponding musical action. Hyper instruments are directly derived through conventional instruments and therefore, they respect this basic link with traditional instruments. However, hyper instruments revolutionize the functionality of conventional instruments since they fundamentally enhance the two sides of the interaction.

The differences between Western and Chinas education Essay

The differences between Western and Chinas education - Essay Example The same is related to teachers. Their salary, unlike salary of Western teachers, depends on how well their students study. Another difference is that in China children do not choose subject they can study. They have to study all the subjects the school teaches. Only in high school children are allowed to choose some subjects. In Western education children can choose more subjects – they have more freedom in choosing certain specialization. Grades for each subject in China depend mostly on results of tests. While in the Western system assignments completed during each week add to the final grade, tasks that Chinese children do at school do not count to the final grade. The final grade depends on exams. Besides, grades for tests and exams are shown to everybody. As a result every student knows what grades have other students. A teacher then praises students that have good grades and criticized bad students, ties to encourage them to study better. Also the best students get rewards for their excellent grades, even money from school. On contrast, Western schools disclose to a student only his or her grades. In China children spend most of the day at school and evening at extracurricular classes. So those that want to enter a university come home at 9 in the evening. At the same time, western children spend less time studying and have more free

The Rising Price of Food Essay Example for Free

The Rising Price of Food Essay Recent years have seen dramatic increases in the world prices for food commodities. The first half of the year 2008 saw the price of rice go up by 50% and generally speaking, similar increases in other food commodities such as maize, soybeans and wheat have been seen across the world, resulting in various forms of panic. In the Philippines, farmers have begun hoarding supplies of rice, while Indonesians have initiated strikes due to soybean shortages. Generally speaking, these food crises have been attributed to the supply and demand factors resulting from meteorological catastrophes, shortages resulting from poor harvests and swelling populations. (BBC 2008; Lewis 2008) Steinberg (2008) reports that from early 2006 to early 2008, the world prices for corn has risen by 125%, rice by 217%, soybeans by 107% and wheat by 136%. Feilden (2008) opines that while foodstuffs have never been cheap to the point of absurdity, the past thirty years have seen a long period of stability that was bound to end following an expanding middle class emerging from rapidly developing nations such as China and India. Feilden asserts that for the most part, the cost of wheat, corn and soya has fallen in real terms, but continuingly volatile climatological conditions, a diversion of agriculture towards the production of biofuel feedstocks and increasingly luxuriant middle class appetites have made this inevitable. Parry, et al (66) have found that based on projections based on the Special Report on Emission Scenarios (SRES) made by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) that when population growth and rising levels of carbon emissions are combined they create anthropogenic climate change effects that have a detrimental effect on food production. Simply put, they have a negative effect on simulated crop yields, with greater disparities existing between developed and developing countries. Fortunately, these disparities are such that the shortfalls of developing nations are compensated for by the yields of developed nations which derive a limited benefit from climate change. What is problematic is that because of the complex nature of a globalized food supply, there is little to guarantee that these shortfalls in developing nations will be addressed through distribution. Another problematic causal factor driving the food crisis is the increased demand for value-added food commodities resulting from populations that have improved in class standing. For example, prospering Asian peoples have begun to substitute more basic food commodities with input-intensive or highly processed foods, most notably in their consumption of beef. For every kilogram of beef consumed, a great proportion of grain is used for feed. Other examples of value-added commodities include processed foods that utilize corn oil and high fructose corn syrup. (FAO 4) Richard Manning (35-37) opines that grain-based diets are generally diets for the poor. Thus, as nations prosper, the global food supply is stretched to its limit to accommodate a middle class that is increasing to levels it was never designed to anticipate. Following this chain of thought, recent price increases have come from increased use of food inputs rather than an absolute increase in food consumption. However, as suggested, the expanding middle class plays only a fractional role in the food price crisis. It does not mean that the global South is ultimately getting better. For the more than 2. 5 billion people who live on less than two dollars a day, the rise in food prices is a life or death matter, and as such, many from the world’s underclasses are turning towards cheaper food commodities as substitutes for increasingly costly equivalents. Faiola (2008) reports that in Mauritania, some have turned towards consuming sorghum in place of bread, whilst others have begun Indians have replaced soybean oil with groundnut oil. In the Philippines, the local Food and Nutrition Research Institute has proposed replacing some of the flour used in producing the staple known as pan de sal with squash puree instead to allow bakeries to keep the price down. The rise in food prices have also been affected by recent developments in global energy. Heinberg (2007) observes that the yields of industrial agriculture are highly dependent on fossil fuel inputs. While innovations such as crop rotation and the usage of manure and compost help reduce instances of famine, it is the use of fossil fuels in the production of fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides and tractor-powered tillage that permits existing levels of production. In this context, it comes as no surprise then that as oil prices increase, so too does the price of food. Further amplifying the effects of oil price increases, is the diversion of agriculture towards providing for the booming biofuel industry. In a cover story for TIME Magazine, Michael Grunwald (28-33) observes that the diversion of grain-based agriculture from the food supply and towards the production of fuel means that biofuels like ethanol are imposing dramatic impacts upon the costs of maintaining food supply for both the world’s hungry and the world’s well fed, noting that â€Å"the grain it takes to fill an SUV tank could feed a person for a year. † Barrionuevo (2008) notes that while â€Å"ethanol has raised the incomes of farmers† and â€Å"given new hope to flagging rural economies† it is a major impact on the cost of food. The demand for biofuel cannibalizes the existing food supply, increasing the collective demand for grain. Steinberg notes that what also compounds these very real long-term factors is the role which commodity speculation plays in shoring up food prices. He attributes the food price crisis to an onslaught of investment speculation comparable to the subprime crisis which drove up house prices earlier this decade. Quoting the British publication The New Stateman, Steinberg notes that hedge fund groups have thrown billions of dollars into commodities instead. But rather than going into gold and oil, they have gone into cattle, cocoa and corn as ‘soft commodities. ’ Excessive investment drives up food prices, which encourages hoarding. Because a crisis of food supply guarantees a return on these investments, a vicious commodity super-cycle ensues. REFERENCES Lewis, L 2008, ‘Fear of rice riots as surge in demand hits nations across the Far East,’ The Times Online, 8 April. Available from: http://business. timesonline. co. uk/tol/business/industry_sectors/consumer_goods/article3701347. ece [October 15, 2008] BBC News 2008, ‘Cyclone fuels rice price increase,’ BBC News, 7 May. Available from: http://news. bbc. co. uk/2/hi/business/7387251. stm [October 15, 2008] Steinberg, S 2008, ‘Financial speculators reap profits from global hunger,’ Global Research, 24 April. Available from: http://globalresearch. ca/index. php? context=vaaid=8794 [October 15, 2008] Feilden, T 2008, ‘QA: Rising world food prices,’ BBC News, 4 March. Available from: http://news. bbc. co. uk/2/hi/business/7276971. stm [October 15, 2008] Parry, ML, Rosenzweig, C, Iglesias, A, Livermore M Fischer, G 2004, ‘Effects of climate change on global food production under SRES emissions and socio-economic scenarios,’ Global Environmental Change 14, 53-67. Available from: http://www. elsevier. com/framework_aboutus/pdfs/2-Effects_of_climate_change. pdf [October 15, 2008] United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization 2008, ‘Crop Prospects and Food Situation,’ Global Information and Early Warning System on Food and Agriculture, 2, April. Available from: ftp://ftp. fao. org/docrep/fao/010/ai465e/ai465e00. pdf [October 15, 2008] Manning, R 2004, Against the Grain: How Agriculture Has Hijacked Civilization, New York, New York: North Point Press. Heinberg, R 2007, ‘What Will We Eat as the Oil Runs Out? ’ Museletter, 188, 22 November. Available from:http://globalpublicmedia. com/richard_heinbergs_museletter_what_will_we_eat_as_the_oil_runs_out [October 14, 2008] Grunwald, M 2008, ‘The Clean Energy Scam,’ TIME Magazine, 7 April. Barrionuevo, A 2007, ‘Rise in Ethanol Raises Concerns About Corn As a Food,’ The New York Times, 5 January. Faiola, A 2008‘The New Economics of Hunger,’ The Washington Post, April 27. Page A01. Available from: http://www. washingtonpost. com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/04/26/AR2008042602041. html? sid=ST2008042602333 [October 15, 2008] Walt, V 2008 ‘The World’s Growing Food-Price Crisis,’ TIME Magazine, 27 February. Available from: http://www. time. com/time/world/article/0,8599,1717572,00. html [October 14, 2008]

Objectification in An Elegy Written in a Country Church Yard Essay

Objectification in An Elegy Wrote in a Country Church Yard  Ã‚   In "An Elegy Wrote in a Country Church Yard," Gray symbolizes the objectification of the poor as well as the commodification of nature. In doing this, Gray arranges a hierarchy of objectification within the poem. The hierarchical arrangement begins with nature and continues through the poor with the upper class at the apex of the "pyramid." Gray uses the recurring images of nature to illustrate this organization of classes. To accomplish this arrangement, he shifts the focus from nature to the poor through these images. Finally, in "An Elegy Wrote in a Country Church Yard," death of the poor is the only hope for both nature and the peasants to obtain freedom. In other words, by dying, the poor are no longer objectified by the upper class and nature is no longer objectified by the poor. In his "Elegy," Gray symbolizes the objectification of the poor and nature through a hierarchical arrangement and states that death is the only means by which they can both be free. First, Gray uses images of nature to show the pyramid of power and control in society. Through the imagery of the poem, Gray illustrates the ownership of the land and the poor. They are commodities of the wealthy, land owning members of the upper class. Gray writes "Oft did the Harvest to their Sickle Yield/ Their Furrow oft the stubborn Glebe has broke;/How bowed the Woods beneath their sturdy Stroke!"(lines 25-26, 28). These lines not only symbolize the commodification of nature but also of the lower classes. The image of the woods bowing to the poor shows the control the peasants have over nature. The breaking of the land by the sickle also demonstrates the physical might and domination the poor ... ...image of water. Images of the woods "bowing" to the poor workers and of the oceans carrying the sins of the people illustrate the commodification of nature. Images of the poor "wading through Slaughter" and of them harvesting the fields demonstrate the objectification of the lower class in English society. In doing this, Gray establishes a class system with the upper classes controlling the members of the lower classes. After establishing this system of society, Gray then shifts the focus of the poem from the hierarchy to the emancipation of these commodities. Death is the only means for the poor and the land to be freed from society. Works Cited: Gray, Thomas. "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard." in Damrosch, David. The Longman Anthology of British Literature: Volume 1C The Restoration and the 18th Century. New York: Addison Wesley Longman, Inc. 1999.

The Process of an Earthquake

Have you ever wondered what has to happen to make the Earth quake? British engineer John Michell did. He was one of the first fathers of seismology and was also the first to correctly state what the cause of earthquakes was. In 1960, Michell noted that â€Å"earthquakes and the waves of energy that they make are caused by shifting masses of rock, miles below the surface† in a scientific memoir (USGS, 32). In order for you to completely understand the process of an earthquake you must first understand the process of how an earthquake is measured.An earthquake may not be able to be predicted at the moment but the intensity and magnitude of the earthquake can be measured and categorized. This is done using the Richter magnitude scale. The Richter magnitude scale was developed as a mathematical instrument to compare the size of earthquakes in 1935 by Charles Francis Richter. He was able to recognize that the seismic waves radiated by all earthquakes can provide good estimates of t heir magnitude (Richter). A seismograph is what is used to measure the amount of energy that an earthquake releases as well as the magnitude of the earthquake.It is a logarithmic scale, which means that the numbers on the scale measures factors of 10, so each whole number unit represents a tenfold increase in amplitude. The energy that is measure is about 32 times greater than the next smaller whole number. Using this scale, a magnitude 5 earthquake would result in ten times the level of ground shaking as magnitude 4 earthquakes. Think of it in relation to the energy that is released by explosives. A magnitude 1 seismic wave releases as much energy as blowing up 1 ounce of TNT, which is the equivalent of slamming a large rock onto a table.A magnitude 8 earthquake releases as much energy as detonating 1 million tons of TNT (Richter). An earthquake measuring more than 6. 0 can cause detrimental damage (see fig. 1). The biggest quake in the world since 1900 scored a 9. 5 on the Richter scale in May of 1960. More than 2,000 people were killed, 3,000 injured, 2,000,000 were left homeless, and there was over $500 million worth of damages to southern Chili (Pararas). Whenever there is an earthquake, the layers of the earth grind past one another causing the ground all around to rumble and shake, resulting in severe damage.The Earth is forged of four main layers: the inner core, the outer core, the mantle and the crust. The crust and the mantle are merely the skin to the earth’s surface. This skin is unlike our skin, though. It consists of many pieces that can slowly move past one another. These puzzle-like pieces are called tectonic plates. The edges of the tectonic plates are known as plate boundaries. Plate boundaries have many faults with very rough and jagged edges that can get stuck together. The majority of the world’s earthquakes occur on these faults.When the plates continue to try to move, the edges of the plate boundaries violently unstick, re sulting in the sudden release of energy in all directions. This energy becomes seismic waves, which act like ripples on a pond. The Earth shakes as these seismic waves move through it, and when the waves rip through the earth’s surface, the ground and anything on it shakes terribly (USGS, Science). This can be felt for miles away. The longest earthquake ever recorded originated from the center of the Indian Ocean in December of 2004.It was reported as a 9. 5 on the Richter scale after 3 months, and was measured at a whopping 800 miles, which is about the distance from Houston, Texas to Atlanta, Georgia (Longest). It created the biggest gash in the Earth’s seabed ever. That same earthquake also created horrible conditions such as the Tsunami at Sumatra which caused 61 deaths, and $75 million in damages in Hawaii. There are three different types of plate boundaries; impact zones, spreading zones, and slipping zones.Furthermore, there are two different kinds of impact zon es. One type is when oceanic crust hits continental crust causing a boundary deduction to happen. With the oceanic crust being denser than the continental crust, it withdraws beneath the continental crust. The oceanic crust then melts as it goes under the continental crusts due to the friction of the crusts rubbing against one another. The pressure of the heat causes the melted rock to rise up through faults in the continental crust. This is what causes a volcano to erupt.Another type of impact zone is where one crust is pushed upwards when two continental crusts collide. Mountain ranges are formed this way. The world’s greatest land mountain range, the Himalaya-Karakorum in Asia is the spawn of two continental crusts colliding (USGS, 11). When two plates are moving apart along mid-ocean ridges, a spreading zone occurs. This is when two tectonic plates are moving away from each other and is forming a new crust from the rising magma that is released from the Earth’s cor e.An oceanographer at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Seattle lab, Edward T Baker says, â€Å"A spreading zone can be considered as a â€Å"linear volcano† with vent holes occurring at various points along its meandering crest†. (Raloff). Earth's mid-ocean ridge is one near-continuous zone of spreading seafloor. When one plate grinds past another plate it is known as a slipping zone. Slips along the faults in the crust allow stress from the grinding to be released. These fault slips are what cause earthquakes. Just when you might believe that an earthquake is over, you could be mistaken.Earthquakes are capable of having aftershocks that can last several years. The New Madrid fault quake of December 16, 1811 in the United States had reported ground shaking for 24 hours. Occasional severe shaking and disruptions lasted for weeks and aftershocks were felt up until 1817 (USGS, Historic). An aftershock is a smaller earthquake that happens in the same a rea of the original earthquake. As the crust around the displaced fault plane adjusts to the changes that occurred, aftershocks will follow, until the Earth has settled back in place.The final piece of the process of an earthquake is the aftermath. The aftermath is the devastation that an earthquake or any other type of disaster can leave in its wake. When the ground ruptures from the shaking caused by an earthquake, it can result in damage to bridges, dams, roads, railroad tracks, and the foundation of buildings. They can also cause landslides and avalanches as well. Another major cause of damage is when power lines are ripped down and gas lines rupture; this can most likely cause fires.Also, soil liquefaction is very common in earthquakes. It occurs when water-saturated granular material, like sand, momentarily loses its strength and turns from a solid to a liquid. In the 1964 Alaskan earthquake soil liquefaction was the cause of many buildings and bridges sinking to the ground, g radually collapsing upon one another (Dubner). Even undersea earthquakes can create tsunamis that have the possibility to cause extreme damage along the coast. 75 million Americans are in significant danger of being a victim to an earthquake.According to the United States Geological Survey, there have been over 2 million deaths attributed to earthquakes since 1900. The USGS pinpoints 20,000 earthquakes a year; that is about 50 earthquakes a day (USGS, Earthquakes). In conclusion, the movement of the earth’s crust has shaped the earth for hundreds of millions of years, moving the sharp and stony edges over, under, and past one another. Sometimes the movements and the release of energy caused by an earthquake are smooth and gradual; other times, the plates stay locked together.That is when the stockpiled energy that has been storing in between the plates grows strong enough to break apart. That is what makes the earthquake. The Richter scale can tell us the intensity and magnit ude of an earthquake but cannot predict one. Works Cited â€Å"The Longest EarthQuake Ever Recorded. † World Most RSS. N. p. , 6 Sept. 2011. Web. 11 Apr. 2013. Pararas-Caryannis, George. â€Å"Index. html. † Index. html. N. p. , n. d. Web. 11 Apr. 2013. â€Å"Richter Scale. † Science in the Early Twentieth Century: An Encyclopedia. Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO, 2005. Credo Reference. 0 June 2008. Web. 11 Apr. 2013. Raloff, Janet. â€Å"Pearson – Science News. † Pearson – Science News. N. p. , n. d. Web. 21 Mar. 2013. United States Geological Survey. Earthquake Facts. N. p. , 24 July 2012. Web. 11 Apr. 2013. Line 32 United States Geological Survey. Earthquakes with 1,000 or More Deaths since 1900. N. p. , 30 Nov. 2012. Web. 11 Apr. 2013. United States Geological Survey. Historic Earthquakes. N. p. , 01 Nov. 2012. Web. 11 Apr. 2013. United States Geological Survey. The Science of Earthquakes. By Lisa Wald. N. p. , 24 July 2012. Web. 09 Apr. 2013.