Read, fill in the blanks with appropriate relative pronouns, and then listen and check

LIQUID PAPER

This is the story of a very simple invention ………... you can find in almost every office in the whole world today. It is also the story of an inventor …………… creativity and persistence resulted in a very useful product. What is the famous invention? It is Liquid Paper, the white liquid ……….. covers up the mistakes you make when writing or typing. It was invented by Bette Nesmith Graham, a secretary in Dallas, Texas, in the early 1950s,…………..began using tempera paint to cover up the typing errors in her work.


At the time, she was a twenty-seven-year-old single mother of one son, struggling to make ends meet and working as a secretary to the chairman of a big Dallas bank. When she began to work with her first electric typewriter, she found that the type marks she typed onto the paper didn't erase as cleanly as those from manual typewriters. So Ms. Nesmith, ……….. was also an artist, quietly began painting out her mistakes. Soon she was supplying bottles of her homemade preparation, …………… she called Mistake Out, to other secretaries in the building.

When she lost her job with the company, she turned to working full time to develop the Mistake Out as a business, expanding from her house into a small trailer she had bought for the backyard. In hopes of marketing her product, she approached IBM, ………… turned her down. She stepped up her own marketing and within a decade was a financial success. The product, ………..came to be called Liquid Paper, was manufactured in four countries and sold in nearly three dozen. In fiscal 1979, which ended about six months before she sold the company, it had sales of $38 million, of ………….. $3.5 million was net income. By the time she finally sold her business to Gillette in 1979, she had built her simple, practical idea into a $47.5 million business.

It is heartwarming that the story has a happy ending in more ways than one. Ms. Nesmith remarried and became Mrs. Graham. Her son, Michael, a musician of whom she is understandably proud, became very successful as one of a music group called the Monkees, ……………. appeared on an NBC television show for several years in the mid-1960s. Subsequently a country-rock musician, a songwriter, and a video producer, he now heads a production company in California, …………… he also directs some charities.

With some of her profits, Mrs. Graham established a foundation ……….. purpose is to provide leading intellectuals with the time, space, and compatible colleagues …………. they need to ponder and articulate the most important social problems of our era. Bette Nesmith Graham first developed a product ……….. there was clearly a need for; then she used the substantial profits for charitable purposes, …………….. is a fine thing to do. The story of Liquid Paper and Bette Nesmith Graham is a story everyone can appreciate.

It shows how a wonderful product came to market because of the cleverness and perseverance of its inventor. Perhaps you, too, have a clever idea ………… will spread like wildfire if only you can give it the kind of spark that Mrs. Graham gave to her product.