OPEN CLOZE PRACTICE - 01

OPEN CLOZE PRACTICE – 01

Passage 1:

If you go back far (1) ______, everything lived in the sea. At various (2) _______ in evolutionary
history, enterprising individuals within many different animal groups moved out (3) ________ the
land, sometimes even to the (4) _______ parched deserts, taking (5) _______ own private
seawater with them in blood and cellular fluids. In (6) _______ to the reptiles, birds, mammals and
insects which we see all around us, other groups that have succeeded out of water (7) ________
scorpions, snails, crustaceans such as woodlice and land crabs, millipedes and centipedes, spiders
and various worms. And we mustn’t forget the plants, without (8) _______ prior invasion of the land
none of the other migrations (9) _______ have happened.

Moving from water to land involved a major redesign of every aspect of life, including breathing
and reproduction. (10) ________, a good number of thoroughgoing land animals later turned
around, abandoned their hard-earned terrestrial retooling, and returned to the water (11)
________. Seals have only gone part way back. They show us what the intermediates might have
been like, on the way to extreme cases (12) _______ as whales and dugongs. Whales (including
the small whales we (14) _______ dolphins) and dugongs, with their (15) _______ cousins the
manatees, ceased to be land creatures altogether and reverted (16) _______ the full marine
habits of their remote ancestors. They don’t even come ashore to breed. They do, however, still
breathe air, (17) ________ never developed anything equivalent to the gills of their earlier marine
incarnation. Turtles went back to the sea a very long time (18) ________ and, like all vertebrate
returnees to the water, they breathe air. However, they are, in one (19) ________, less fully given
back to the water (20) ________ whales or dugongs, for turtles still lay their eggs on beaches.
(Adapted from The History of The Turtoise)

Passage 2:

THE GAOKAO GRIND

In the past few days nearly 10 million young Chinese have (1) ________ their results from the
world’s largest and most important academic exam, commonly (2) _______ as the gaokao. In
some places the news has been sent to them by text message—an innovation that has done (3)
________ to compensate for the horrors of what they have endured: years of cramming at the (4)
________ of any other activity in the hope of a gaokao score that will qualify them for (5)
________ to a leading university. In China even more than (6) ________, achievement in
education is judged not by how well you perform at university, but by which one you attend.
Everything, (7) _________, depends on the gaokao. The exam is both cherished and despised. It
is praised by many as being a relatively corruption-free method of ensuring advancement for
those who study hard. The nation rejoiced when the gaokao was restored in 1977 after the death
of Mao, (8) ________ had scrapped it and filled colleges with ill-educated devotees of his cult.
But many people resent the huge stress it imposes on adolescents. In recent years, (9) ________
with the rapid growth of China’s middle class, the numbers seeking education abroad, mainly in the
West, have soared. Last year more than 600,000 did so, four times as many as a decade earlier.
Escaping the gaokao ordeal is often (10) _______ as a reason.
(Adapted from The Economist)

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