Another Giant Sinkhole Appears in China, Swallows One Person

Did you ever play that game as a kid where you jump from carpet square to carpet square, pretending everything in between is a bottomless chasm? Pedestrians in China do that all the time, except for them it's absolutely real.

Thanks to shoddy construction jobs, leaky pipes eroding soil and other infrastructural problems, Chinese cities are plagued with sinkholes. Almost a hundred of them developed in Beijing during one month in 2012. Sinkholes have eaten pedestrians while they walked down the sidewalk, enveloped six buildings, a couple trees and some sidewalk and now have taken a poor man on a four-story-deep ride to oblivion in Shenzhen, a southern city near Hong Kong.