Questão 750856

01 Russia cleans up after meteor blast injures more than

02 1,000

03 CHELYABINSK, Russia — Residents of Chelyabinsk, an

04 industrial city 1,500 km (950 miles) east of Moscow,

05 heard an explosion, saw a bright light and then felt a

06 shockwave that blew out windows and damaged the

07 wall and roof of a zinc plant. A fireball traveling at a

08 speed of 30 km (19 miles) per second according to

09 Russian space agency Roscosmos, blazed across the

10 horizon, leaving a long white trail visible as far as 200

km (125 miles) away.

11 km (125 miles) away.

12 NASA estimated the meteor was 55 feet across

13 before entering Earth's atmosphere and weighed about

14 10,000 tons. It exploded miles above Earth, releasing

15 nearly 500 kilotons of energy - about 30 times the size of

16 the nuclear bomb dropped on the Japanese city of

17 Hiroshima in World War Two, NASA added. "We would

18 expect an event of this magnitude to occur once every

19 100 years on average," said Paul Chodas of NASA's

20 Near-Earth Object Program Office at the Jet Propulsion

21 Laboratory in Pasadena, California. "When you have a

22 fireball of this size we would expect a large number of

23 meteorites to reach the surface and in this case there

24 were probably some large ones."

25 Divers searched a lake near the city of

26 Chelyabinsk, where a hole several feet wide had

27 opened in the ice, but had so far failed to find any large

28 fragments, officials said. Search teams said they had

29 found small objects up to about 1 cm (half-an-inch) wide

30 that might be fragments of a meteorite, but no larger

31 pieces.

32 The Chelyabinsk regional governor said the

33 strike caused about 1 billion roubles (\$33 million) worth

34 of damage. Life in the city had largely returned to normal

35 by Saturday although 50 people were still in hospital.

36 Officials said more than 1,200 people were injured,

37 mostly by flying glass.

38 Repair work had to be done quickly because of

39 the freezing temperatures, which sank close to -20

40 degrees Celsius (-4 Fahrenheit) at night. Emergencies

41 Minister Vladimir Puchkov inspected the damage after

42 President Vladimir Putin sent him to the region. His

43 ministry is under pressure to clean up fast following

43 criticism over the failure to issue warnings in time before

44 fatal flooding in southern Russia last summer and over

45 its handling of forest fires in 2010.

(This text was adapted from http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2013-02-16/news/chi-russiameteorite-20130215_1_meteor-explosion-site-fireball)

In "Search teams said they had found small objects…" (lines 28-31), the verbs in bold are in the Past Perfect Tense. The use of this tense is adequate in: