6 Minute English / Can you stop a disaster?

Note: This is not a word-for-word transcript.

Hello. This is 6 Minute English from BBC Learning English. I m Beth.

And I m Neil. Depending on how you look at it, Roy Sullivan was either the luckiest or the unluckiest man alive. Working as a US park ranger, Roy was struck by lightning on seven different occasions, and survived them all!

But Roy isn't the only victim of an unpredictable natural event, sometimes called an act of God. In the last decade, an estimated half a million people have died globally in natural disasters such as earthquakes, tsunamis, hurricanes and cyclones.

In 2023, at least 60,000 people died after earthquakes in Turkey and Syria, and things are predicted to get worse in the future due to climate change and increasing populations. So can anything be done to stop natural disasters? Or, like Roy Sullivan, should we accept that some things are beyond our control? In this programme we'll be finding out, and, as usual, we'll be learning some useful new vocabulary too.

Throughout history, floods, when there's too much water, and droughts, when there isn't enough, have caused most human deaths. But with climate change, new dangers are emerging. But do you know, Neil, which natural disaster is most responsible for human deaths now? Is it:

a) earthquakes?

b) tsunamis? or,

c) hurricanes?

I'm not sure, but you do hear a lot about terrible earthquakes in the news, don't you? Probably earthquakes.