MONOPOLY – Cloze Test

CLOZE TEST

Read the text and complete the chart below with a word from the list that comes after the text. Every word can only be used ONCE. There are EIGHT words that you don’t need to use. Question 0 has been answered as an example.

MONOPOLY

One night in late 1932, a Philadelphia businessman named Charles Todd and his wife, Olive, introduced their friends Charles and Esther Darrow to a real-0) __________ board game they had recently learned. As the two couples sat around the board, enthusiastically rolling the 1) __________ , buying up properties and moving their counters around, the Todds were pleased to note that the Darrows liked the game. In fact, they were so taken with it that Charles Todd made them a set of their own, and began teaching them some of the more advanced rules. The game didn’t have an official name: it wasn’t sold in a box, but passed from friend to friend. But everybody called it ‘the monopoly game’.

Together with other friends, they played many times. One day, despite all of his exposure to the game, Darrow – who was unemployed, and desperate for money to 2) __________ his family – asked Charles Todd for a written copy of the rules. Todd was slightly perplexed, as he had never written them up. Nor did it appear that written rules existed elsewhere.

In fact, the rules to the game had been invented in Washington DC in 1903 by a 3) __________, progressive woman named Elizabeth Magie. But her place in the game’s folk history was lost for decades and ceded to the man who had picked it up at his friend’s house: Charles Darrow. Today, Magie’s story can be told in full. But even though much of the story has been around for 40 years, the Charles Darrow myth persists 4) __________ an inspirational parable of American innovation – thanks in no small part to Monopoly’s publisher and the man himself. After he sold a version of the game to Parker Brothers and it became a phenomenal success, eventually making him millions, one journalist 5) __________ another asked him how he had managed to invent Monopoly out of 6) __________ air – a seeming sleight of hand that had brought joy into so many households. “It’s a freak,” Darrow told the Germantown Bulletin, a Philadelphia paper. “Entirely unexpected and illogical.”

To Elizabeth Magie, known to her friends as Lizzie, the problems of the new century were so vast, the 7) __________ inequalities so massive and the monopolists so mighty that it seemed impossible that an unknown woman working as a stenographer stood a chance at easing society’s 8) __________ with something as trivial as a board game. But she had to try.

Night after night, after her work at her office was done, Lizzie sat in her home, drawing and redrawing, thinking and rethinking. It was the early 1900s, and she wanted her board game to reflect her progressive political views – that was the 9) __________ point of it.

The descendant of Scottish immigrants, Lizzie had pale skin, a strong jaw line and a strong work ethic. She was then unmarried, unusual for a woman of her age at the time. Even more unusual, however, was the fact that she was the head of her 10) __________. Completely on her own, she had saved up for and bought her home, along with several acres of property.

She lived in Prince George’s county, a Washington DC neighbourhood where the residents on her block included a dairyman, a peddler who identified himself as a “huckster”, a sailor, a carpenter and a musician. Lizzie shared her house with a male actor who paid rent, and a black female servant. She was also intensely political, teaching classes about her political beliefs in the evenings after work. But she wasn’t reaching enough people. She needed a new medium – something more interactive and creative.

There was one obvious outlet. At the turn of the 20th century, board games were becoming increasingly commonplace in 11) __________-class homes. In addition, more and more inventors were discovering that the games were not just a pastime but also a means of communication. And so Lizzie set to work.

She began speaking in public about a new concept of hers, which she called the Landlord’s Game. “It is a practical demonstration of the present system of land-grabbing with all its usual outcomes and consequences,” she wrote in a political magazine. “It might well have been called the ‘Game of Life’, as it contains all the elements of success and failure in the real world, and the object is the same as the human race in general seem[s] to have, i.e., the accumulation of wealth.”

Lizzie’s game featured play money and deeds and properties that could be bought and sold. Players borrowed money, 12) __________ from the bank or from each other, and they had to pay taxes. And it featured a path that allowed players to circle the board – in contrast to the linear-path design used by many games at the time. In one corner were the Poor House and the Public Park, and across the board was the Jail. Another corner contained an image of the globe and an homage to Lizzie’s political hero, the economist Henry George, whose ideas about putting the burden of taxation on wealthy landowners inspired the game: “Labor upon Mother Earth Produces Wages.” Also included on the board were three words that have endured for more than a century after Lizzie scrawled them there: GO TO JAIL.

Adapted from: ©The Guardian

AFTER                           EITHER                          LIKE                              TAKEN

AS                                 ESTATE                         MID                              THIN

BEHIND                        HOUSEHOLD               MIDDLE                        OUTCOME

BOLD                            ILLS                               OR                                WELL

DICE                              INCOME                       SUPPORT                     WHOLE

 

0) ESTATE

 

 

KEY

 

0) ESTATE

1. DICE
2. SUPPORT
3. BOLD
4. AS
5. AFTER
6. THIN
7. INCOME
8. ILLS
9. WHOLE
10. HOUSEHOLD
11. MIDDLE
12. EITHER