Barry Greenstein (cloze)

instructions: put one word from the list in each of the blank spaces; each word is used once and only once.

Barry Greenstein ______________ up in Chicago, a city in the central United States. He was an excellent student. Once, he got such a high score on an IQ test that his father, who was a high school ______________, was sure there was something wrong with the test.

Mathematics was always Barry’s favourite ______________. When he was in high school, he took a test called the SAT. This test is taken by students all over the United States who are trying to get into university. Barry got the right answer to every question on the mathematics ______________of the test.

He was also good with computers. Once, one of his teachers gave him some old computers to play with and a ______________to read. Over the weekend, Barry wrote a ______________ for a computer golf game.

By the time he was twelve years old, in 1968, Barry was playing poker with his friends. Poker is a card game in which players make ______________ with each other about the cards they are holding. At first, Barry and his friends ______________ for small amounts of money, but before Barry left high school they were playing for much larger amounts. At university, Barry started playing with serious gamblers—rich businessmen. He was a very good player by that time, and he made a lot of money. He easily won enough to pay for his ______________.

Barry’s mathematical ______________ helped him in his poker playing, but it wasn’t the only reason for his success. While he was still in university, he developed a ______________ that helped him win. He discovered that if he played for a long time his ______________ eventually got tired and stopped playing well. Then Barry played even more ______________ than usual and he often won a lot of money.

In those days, his favourite place for playing was a bar in a______________ neighbourhood. It was too dangerous to go into the parking lot when it was dark, so the poker games went on till ______________. Toward the end of the night everyone except Barry got very tired. He stayed awake and won their money.

After he got his ______________, Barry went to graduate school in mathematics. By the time he was twenty-nine, in 1984, he nearly had his Ph.D. He was also ______________ around $100,000 a year playing poker. He had bought a Jaguar—a very ______________ car. And he had married a woman called Donna who had three children from a ______________ marriage.

Barry wanted to have legal custody of Donna’s children; in other words, he wanted to have the same rights and ______________ as he would have had if he had been their real father. He talked to his lawyer about this, and his lawyer told him he had no chance of getting custody. If Barry said he was a gambler, no judge would give him custody because gamblers are not ______________ people. And if he said he was a graduate student, then no judge would give him custody because graduate students don’t make any money.