Duplicate this page before you start, and write your answers into your own copy. Everything you need is on this page. Work through the sections in order, on your own, and do not read ahead.
Sections 5 and 7 are the ones that matter most. Whatever state your answers are in, make sure you reach them.
Last lesson you put twelve questions to one claim about wolves and trees. Today you meet four questions of a different kind: not questions about a single claim, but questions about a whole kind of knowledge.
L'Aquila a few days after the earthquake of 6 April 2009. Photograph: Lasagnolo9, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0. Source
L'Aquila is a medieval city in the mountains of central Italy. It has been badly damaged by earthquakes many times in its history, and everybody who lives there knows it.
From the end of 2008 the ground under the city kept shaking. There were months of small tremors, a pattern seismologists call a swarm. Most were too weak to do any damage, but on 30 March 2009 one reached magnitude 4.1, and people were frightened.
The next day, 31 March, an official government committee met in L'Aquila to assess the danger. Its members were three seismologists, a volcanologist, two engineers who study how buildings behave in earthquakes, and Bernardo De Bernardinis, the deputy head of Italy's Civil Protection Department.
Before the meeting had even started, De Bernardinis told a television interviewer that the scientists had assured him the situation was favourable, because the small tremors were releasing energy. Seismologists later said there was no scientific basis for that claim.
Six days later, in the early hours of 6 April 2009, an earthquake of magnitude 6.3 struck the city. 309 people were killed. Many of them had stayed indoors that night.
In October 2012 an Italian court convicted all seven members of the committee of manslaughter, and sentenced each of them to six years in prison.
✍️ Write here, on your own.
You have just judged a verdict on very little information. Before anybody could judge it properly, they would need to know a great deal more.
✍️ Before you read on, write here: six questions you would need answered before you could decide whether the verdict was fair. They can be about anything: earthquakes, the scientists, the meeting, the official, the people of L'Aquila, the buildings, the law. Do not ask anything already answered above.
