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四川省汶川县发生7.8级地震，给包括成都在内的受灾地区造成巨大的人员伤亡和财产损失，解放军和武警部队多路兵力正竭力向汶川挺进， 各界人士积极为地震灾区捐款，相信灾区人民一定能够战胜灾害、渡过难关，夺取抗震救灾斗争的最后胜利。 英语四级考试网向地震灾害中遇难的人民群众致以沉痛的哀悼，向灾区的同学慰问,希望大家能平安度过难关。
The deadly earthquake that rocked Southwestern China and felt all across China and beyond, had left nearly 10,000 people dead by midnight Monday, and the death toll is expected to climb as rescue efforts are intensifying.
And in the neighboring provinces as Gansu and Shanxi, nearly 200 were confirmed dead, according to a Xinhua report.
Xinhua said in a news flash that in Sichuan Province alone, which was hit the hardest, the death toll there has risen to nearly 10,000.
Chinese President Hu Jintao, who had just completed a 5-day official visit to Japan, has ordered prompt rescue efforts to take care of the affected. Premier Wen Jiabao has cut short his inspection trip in central Henan Province, and have flown to Chengdu to lead the government rescue efforts.
Late Monday evening, President Hu urged governments at all levels to regard relieving major quake as the top priority at a Politburo standing committee meeting on late Monday evening.
Presided over by Hu, the meeting called on disaster relieving personnel to go to the quake hit areas as soon as possible and mount all-out efforts to save the injured.
And in Dujiangyan, Premier Wen Jiabao has pledged to save as many lives as the rescue teams can in southwest China's Sichuan Province which was hit by a major quake on Monday afternoon.
Wen inspected a hospital and a school in Dujiangyan, a city northwest of the provincial capital Chengdu, partly damaged by the quake.
Up to 900 teenagers were trapped as buildings of Juyuan Middle School partly collapsed. Rescuers are seen in TV footage using cranes to move away cement and steel structures. Rescuers had recovered at least 60 bodies from the debris, according to Xinhua.
Officials in the Xiang'e Township middle school in Dujiangyan, about 100 km from epicenter Wenchuan, said fewer than 100 students out of 420 students survived after a powerful quake brought down a major teaching buildings in the school.
The road from Dujiangyan to Wenchuan, epicenter of the quake, was blocked by rock and mud slides, holding up rescue, medical and other disaster relief teams in the city.
"Please just hold on, people are going to get you out of there! " the Premier told the people trapped in the collapsed buildings of the hospital in a loudspeaker.
When comforting patients and medical staffs in the hospital, Wen asked rescuing troops to search every corner for people waiting for salvation and carry out the rescue work in an orderly way.
"If there is a gleam of hope, we will do all the best to save the people," Wen vowed at a middle school of Juyuan town, adding that the rescuing team would not rest until the last one under the ruin was saved.
"The medical experts are coming, the rescuing planes will land soon," Wen told people crying for help in the school, "I was told many trapped people have hopes to survive from the disaster."
He made a three-time bow to pay his respect to the bodies of the people killed by the quake laid on the school's square, saying that he was very depressed.
Premier Wen told officials at the temporary headquarters for disaster relief in Dujiangyan that roads to Wenchuan should be recovered as soon as possible at all costs.
"The road is the key for the relief work since we can only know the situation there when we can send people and we can only transport the injured out when the road is clean," Wen said.
China's state seimological administration reported the earthquake hit Sichuan Province at 2:28 pm Beijing Time Monday, at a destructive scale of 7.8 on the Richter calculations. The US Geologocial Survey said on its website that the epicentre lies 29 kilometres below the surface, and at a scale of 7.5.
More than 5,000 PLA officers and soliders and 3,000 police have also rushed to Wenchuan and surrounding areas to spearhead the rescue efforts.
Premier Wen told reporters during his flight to Sichuan that the central government is closely monitoring the disaster relief work, and Wen urged for calm, efficiency and confidence in fighting the killer tremor.
"I will be in charge of relief work headquarters that has been set up with eight State Council departments," Wen said.
Chinese reporters in Juyuan town, about 60 miles from the epicenter, said that they saw trapped teenagers struggling to break loose from underneath the rubble of the three-story building "while others were crying out for help."
Two teenage girl students were quoted as saying they escaped because they had "run faster than others.
营救人员尽力搜救幸存者
Published: May 14, 2008
BEIJING — Tens of thousands of people across southwest China remained buried beneath rubble on Tuesday as rescue workers struggled to reach areas cut off by a powerful earthquake that has left thousands dead and hundreds of thousands of others injured or homeless.
By late evening Tuesday, the death toll had exceeded 13,000, according to state media, quoting provincial authorities, with tens of thousands still missing, making it China’s deadliest natural disaster in three decades. Officials said they thought the death toll could still climb dramatically higher as workers broke through to the affected areas and the full scope of the disaster became clearer.
The authorities said that more than 18,000 people were still unaccounted for in Mianyang County in Sichuan Province and another 2,300 were missing in the collapse of a school and two factories in the nearby town of Shifang.
As a steady rain fell throughout the day, emergency workers struggled to pull survivors and bodies from flattened buildings in the few towns accessible to heavy rescue machinery. Nearly 2,000 of the dead included students and teachers killed when school buildings in the region crumbled.
More than 1,300 soldiers and medics spent the day clambering over landslides and the remnants of a mountain highway to reach Wenchuan, a city of 100,000 and the epicenter of the quake. The earthquake struck on Monday afternoon with a preliminary magnitude of 7.9.
Most victims were in the rugged center of Sichuan Province, although scores of deaths have been reported in five adjacent provinces. The official Xinhua news agency said that 37 tourists were killed when their bus was inundated by a rockslide, although it did not provide further details.
The authorities said 2,000 tourists were traveling throughout the region at the time of the quake, including 15 Britons and a group of 12 Americans on a panda-watching tour. A spokesman for the World Wildlife Fund, which sponsored the trip to the Wolong Nature Reserve, said they had yet to hear from the Americans, although he added they were in a rural area and presumed to be safe.
The earthquake on Monday shook buildings as far south as Thailand and set off another, smaller quake in the outskirts of Beijing, 900 miles away. The central government, which said it was spending $120 million on rescue efforts, has sent 50,000 soldiers to the disaster zone. Prime Minister Wen Jiabao flew to Sichuan hours after the earthquake struck, and has been shown personally directing the emergency effort.
News of the quake has dominated Chinese television. The state-controlled media has been especially aggressive in its coverage, with reporters fanning out across the stricken region. Home video, cellphone images and commentary have been flowing uncensored onto Web sites.
In Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan, thousands of residents, rattled by more than 1,000 tremors, camped out in the streets. One aftershock on Tuesday afternoon registered a magnitude of 6.1. Most of the worst-hit areas remained without cellphone service. Officials said 13 tank cars containing gasoline on a derailed freight train in neighboring Gansu Province were still burning on Tuesday night.
The quake destroyed 80 percent of structures in some of the towns and small cities near its epicenter, Chinese officials said. The earthquake is China’s biggest natural disaster since another one leveled the city of Tangshan in eastern China in 1976, leaving more than 240,000 people dead and posing a severe challenge to the governing Communist Party, which initially tried to cover up the catastrophe.
Local leaders may also face intense scrutiny of their compliance with building codes. Since the Tangshan earthquake, China has required that new structures withstand major quakes. But the collapse of schools, hospitals and factories in several different areas around Sichuan may raise questions about how rigorously such codes have been enforced during China’s recent, epic building boom.
The powerful initial quake struck at 2:28 p.m. near Wenchuan County, according to China’s State Seismological Bureau. Most of the heavy damage appeared to be concentrated in nearby towns, which by Chinese standards are not heavily populated. Chengdu, the largest city in the area, with a population of about 4 million, is about 60 miles away and did not appear to have suffered major damage or heavy casualties.
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