Arts and painting

Early life

Van Gogh was born     [In, On, At, For] March 30, 1853, to upper middle class parents. He           [spend, was spent, has spent, spent]his early adulthood working for a firm of art dealers before            [travelling, travel, travels, travelled]to The Hague, London and Paris.

He was deeply religious as a younger man and aspired to be a pastor,           [as, like, comparing, just]his father. He became a teacher in England and then he worked as a missionary         [at, on, in, next to] a mining region in Belgium       [whose, when, where, that] he sketched people from the local community, and in 1885 painted his first major work The Potato Eaters. His palette then consisted mainly     [in, of, for, by] somber earth tones and showed no sign of the vivid coloration that distinguished his later paintings.

Read and match the parts of the sentence.

Read the sentence and choose the correct variant. Use The Past Perfect or The Past Perfect Continuous.

They ....... the task before the bell rang.