Answer to Question 1
The three major categories of threat or hazards are: (1) natural, which include weather conditions as well as animal and human diseases. (2) technological and accidental, examples of which are dam failures and accidental/unintended release of hazardous materials into the environment; and (3) terrorist and human-caused, events are intentional and intended to disrupt systems, destroy property, and/or kill people. The severity continuum is a guide to categorizing events so that important distinctions can be made between them. It is composed of four points: (1) An emergency marked by actual danger to the lives of persons and/or the safety of property that requires a response (emergencies ordinarily are handled locally). (2) A disaster is more severe than an emergency because it causes a serious disruption of the functioning of an entity, such as a community, and produces widespread human, material, economic, and/or environmental losses that exceed the ability of a community to cope with it using just its own resources. (3) A catastrophe is an incident that directly or indirectly affects large portions or all of an entire country and requires national and sometimes international responses. (4) An extinction event is the final event in human history, resulting in the loss of all human life on the planet. The probability of a human extinction event is presently very slight. Examples will vary, but should have enough detail that it is easily explained why they belong in that particular thread/hazards category and why they belong in a particular severity continuum category.
Answer to Question 2
c