 | | | | | | | |
| Words in the News
Monday 04 February 2002
Vocabulary from the news. Listen to and read the report then find explanations of difficult words below.
| |
|
| |  | | |
People smuggler arrested
Summary: Police in southern China's Fujian province say they've arrested one of the region's most wanted people smugglers, known as snakeheads. The man is reported to have helped almost 400 Chinese illegal immigrants get to Japan last year. In 2000, 56 Chinese were found dead at Dover after they suffocated in a lorry smuggling them into Britain. This report from Duncan Hewitt.
| | |
|
| | The News | |
| | | Despite the international outrage which greeted the deaths at Dover eighteen months ago, there seems to have been no let-up in the activities of China's people smugglers. State media said police arrested the so-called snakehead, identified only by his surname, Wang, as he was attempting to smuggle sixty people from northeast China to Japan last month. He was said to have been responsible for smuggling three hundred and ninety-six people to Japan in four groups last year. Reports said he was just one of ten snakeheads wanted by police in the Fuqing district of Fujian province; the area is just south of the town of Changle, home to many of those who died at Dover. China has pledged to cooperate with the international community, and to take tougher measures to control the exodus - police in Fujian province told the BBC that five hundred snakeheads were arrested in the area last year; and a number of traffickers were recently jailed for up to 15 years. Yet there still seems to be no shortage of citizens seeking work abroad - or of people willing to organise the trade. Last month police in the southern town of Shenzhen caught nineteen stowaways who were concealed inside a metal container being loaded onto a ship bound for the United States. Such methods continue to bring tragedies - last October twenty-five people suffocated in the storage hold of a fishing boat en route from China to South Korea.
| | |
|
| | The Words
| |
| | | outrage
a very strong feeling of anger and shock
| | |
| | | let-up
a reduction, something happening less
| | |
| | | people smugglers
criminals who take people into or out of a country illegally
| | |
| | | pledged
promised
| | |
| | | to take tougher measures
to take stronger action to achieve something
| | |
| | | exodus
when there is an exodus, a lot of people leave a place or country
| | |
| | | traffickers
here traffickers means the same as smugglers
| | |
| | | stowaways
people who hide in a ship or plane in order to make the journey without paying or without legal documents
| | |
| | | suffocated
if you suffocate you die because you don’t have enough air
| | |
| | | en route
if you are en route to a place then you are travelling there
| | |
|
|
| | Read more about this story | |
| | Other Words in the News archives | |
|
