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Grammar

5 Complete the text with the correct form of the verbs in brackets.

It’s Saturday afternoon and Maria Ndiaye 1 ___ (sit) in the shade of a tree, reading. Maria 2 ___ (read) a lot, but there isn’t any ink in her books. Instead, she 3 ___ (pass) her fingers over a series of raised dots. Maria 4 ___ (be) blind since birth, and she 5 ___ (read) Braille for nearly ten years now. Braille is the system that blind and visually impaired people 6 ___ (use) to read and write. It is named after its inventor, Louis Braille.

Braille became blind as a child, when he 7 ___ (play) with a tool in his father’s workshop and it hit him in the eye. Despite his disability, he 8 ___ (attend) the local school, but it was while he 9 ___ (study) in Paris that he developed his new system. He 10 ___ (hear) of a system called ‘night writing’ devised by Captain Charles Barbier of the French army. Night writing was a code of dots and dashes, which 11 ___ (allow) soldiers to read in the dark. Braille 12 ___ (simplify) Barbier’s system into columns containing six dots. Nearly two centuries later, the Braille system 13 ___ (remain) an invaluable tool for people who have lost their sight, like Maria Ndiaye.