The U.S. state of Kentucky has been hit by a powerful（强有力的） tornado（旋风）. U.S. President Joe Biden says it's one of the largest tornado outbreaks（（战争的）爆发） in U.S. history. Hello, I'm Rob（抢劫）, and this is News Review from BBC Learning English, and joining me today is Roy.

  Hello, Roy. Hi Rob, and hello everybody. If you would like to test yourself on the vocabulary around this story, all you need to do is head（率领） to our website, bbclearningenglish.com, to take a quiz. But now, let's hear more about this story from this BBC News report. More than 90 people are now known to have been killed by devastating（破坏性的） tornadoes（旋风） that swept（扫） through the Midwest of the United States on Friday. At least 80 of them were in Kentucky and about 14 across five other states.

  So more than 90 people are now confirmed（证实） dead after tornadoes（旋风） hit the Midwest（中西部） of the U.S. on Friday. Most of the confirmed dead are in Kentucky. Sadly, some people believe that that number of dead is still expected to rise. And we've got three words and expressions from the news headlines（大字标题） about this story that we can use to talk about this story. What are they, please, Roy?

  We do. We have 'wiped（擦） out', 'hell（地狱） on earth' and 'trail（痕迹） of destruction'. So that's 'wiped out', 'hell on earth' and 'trail of destruction（破坏）'. Right, Roy. Well, let's have a look at your first headline, please. OK.

  So our first headline comes from the Telegraph and it reads, 'Kentucky tornado. Entire（全部的） towns wiped（擦） out, says State Governor（州长） Andy Bashir'. That's 'wiped out, destroyed, removed from existence（存在）'. OK. So this is a phrasal verb. First word, 'wiped'.

  W-I-P-E-D. Second word, 'out'. O-U-T. And it means to completely remove something or destroy something. Now, this phrasal verb, 'wipe out', is actually a separable（可分离的） phrasal verb, which means that you can wipe something out or you can wipe out something. Now, let's focus, first of all, on that first word, 'wipe'.

  Rob, you know what 'wipe' is, right? I do. I mean, the verb 'to wipe' means often to clean something. For example, I might wipe the windows to remove all the dirt（尘）. And in my car, I have windscreen（汽车挡风玻璃） wipers, which are those blades（刀刃） that go back and forwards to remove the water, remove the rain from the windscreen so I can see clearly. So it's about removal（移动）, isn't it?

  Yes, absolutely（完全地）. It's this kind of action, usually, if we use our hand, we do that, we wipe something away. In this sense, when we say 'wiped out', it means completely removed or destroyed completely. In the terms of the headlines, we're talking about the wiping out of a town or buildings. Now, this expression also gets used quite a bit when we're talking about populations and populations being eradicated（根除） from history. They're wiped out.

  Yes. Now, a good example of this. If something is removed from history, we could look at the dinosaurs. Now, we know that dinosaurs existed, but they're no longer here. We don't have dinosaurs here with us in the modern times. But we know they existed because we have bones and fossils（化石）.

  Now, these animals were… they went extinct（熄灭的）. They no longer exist. In other words, we can say the dinosaurs were wiped out.