Reading (and use of Eng. ) A2-B1

Text 1. RICE
Did you know that for half the people in the world, rice is _____ most important food?

Most of these people live in Asia _______ a person might eat 90 to 180 kilograms of rice in one year!

But where did rice come from? Indian people _______ growing rice 5000 years ago, but we think that people first grew rice in China.

The first Europeans that grew rice lived in Spain. American settlers _______ growing rice about 400 years ago.

_______ are thousands of different kinds of rice.

Wild rice grows in lakes in Canada and you can sometimes find "hill rice" growing like grass in dry fields. _______ most rice grows in about 15 centimetres of water in special flat fields called "paddies".

Text 2. ICE CREAM
Fifty years ago, people only ate ice cream in the hot summer months - but now it is eaten at any time of the year. Who made the first ice cream is a question _______ we can't answer.

But we think an Italian adventurer called Marco Polo saw people ______ ice cream in China 700 years ago. He brought the idea back to Italy. It soon became very popular.

Ice cream then became very popular in France, _______ only very rich people had enough money to buy it.

Before we had fridges, people used large pieces of ice from lakes _______ ice cream cold.

The first ice cream factory opened in America in 1851. Americans eat more ice cream than _______ other nationality - 23 litres per person per year.

Text 3. MINIATURE PAINTINGS.
Shammi Banu is a painter from India. His family have painted very small paintings called "miniatures" for _______ years.

Everything Shammi knows about painting was taught to _______ by his father.

He was a great teacher. Shammi has taught many people to paint _______ 1997 and now he has British, American and Indian students in his classes.

Shammi used things like plants and flowers to make _______ the colours he needs for his paints.

Making them takes a long time. He breaks the plants into small pieces and _______ washes them and puts them in the paint. When he has the colour he wants, he sometimes adds glue to the paint to help it stay on the paper.