NewsTracker Answers for week of Sep. 18, 2023

Q: Torrential rains last week caused two dams to burst in Libya, killing thousands of people as it destroyed much of the coastal city of Derna, carrying entire neighborhoods into the sea. Where is the North African country of Libya?

Circle the area on this map

Q: After a decade of civil war, Libya was unprepared to cope with a huge storm that crashed into its coast after battering countries in southeastern Europe. What body of water did the storm cross?

A. Arabian Sea

B. Black Sea

C. Caribbean Sea

D. Mediterranean Sea

D. The storm, called Daniel, swept across the Mediterranean Sea after killing more than a dozen people as it ravaged Greece, Turkey and Bulgaria.

Q: “It’s the first time we’ve been exposed to this type of weather,” said a spokesman for the political faction ruling the area around Derna. About 90 percent of Libya’s population lives in which part of the country?

A. North

B. East

C. South

D. West

A. Most Libyans live near the Mediterranean coast at the the northern end of the county. The the extremely hot and dry Libyan Desert covers the rest of the country. With rival governments ruling the western and eastern sections of Libya, the nation’s infrastructure, like the failed dams near Derna, has been neglected. In one day, the storm dropped 250 times the amount of rain the region usually gets in all of September.

Q: Despite years of often violent political division, Libya is still the richest nation on Africa’s mainland. What is the source of its wealth?

A. Agriculture

B. Gold

C. Oil

D. Shipping

C. The discovery of Africa’s largest proven oil reserves in the 1950s and soaring oil prices gave Libya a gross domestic product per person higher than many developed nations in the 1980s. The oil wealth paid for huge infrastructure projects, including the now-collapsed dams that were built in the 1970s.

Q: The mayor of Derna estimated last week that up to 20,000 people may had been killed in the flooding. Libya’s death toll quickly exceeded the number killed this month by an earthquake in which North African nation?

A. Algeria

B. Morocco

C. Sudan

D. Tunis

B. An earthquake with a magnitude of 6.8 on the Richter scale left nearly 3,000 people dead and more than 5,600 injured in Morocco on the northwest corner of Africa.