Every picture tells a story - Module 3
B2 First · Open Cloze · First Expert Student's Resource Book, Pearson Education
For questions 1–8, read the text below and think of the word which best fits each gap. Use only one word in each gap. There is an example at the beginning.
Venice is built on a lagoon and is therefore highly vulnerable (0) ___ changing sea levels. High tides often flood the city, threatening its buildings and rich cultural heritage. Instruments were first used to measure sea levels in 1872 and scientists have (1) ___ looking for ways to find (2) ___ what happened before then, as this could help them predict what might happen in future. Then somebody realised that the 18th-century artist Canaletto, unlike most modern painters, painted exactly (3) ___ he saw, so his famous pictures of Venice are almost (4) ___ accurate as photographs. If you look at them closely, you can see on the buildings a brown-green line (5) ___ marks the average high-tide level at the time. The scientists can therefore see that the sea level in Venice (6) ___ risen by about 2.7 millimetres per year (7) ___ Canaletto's day. More (8) ___ 230 years after his death, therefore, the artist's paintings provide a record of sea levels for a period long before modern measurements began.
Every picture tells a story
Available as a free printable PDF worksheet with an optional answer key.