Read the story below and fill in the gaps with these words: (3 marks)

AFTER – BECAUSE – BEFORE - THEN – SO – THE FOLLOWING YEAR

When was the last time you had a holiday? And did you organise the trip or did you take a package tour? These days, most people choose a package tour, especially when they go abroad on holiday. They pay for their travel and accommodation in their own country, and they take traveller’s cheques which they exchange for local money when they arrive in the foreign country. But in the past it was very different. In fact, (1) __________ the middle of the nineteenth century, travelling for pleasure was rare and very expensive, and only a few rich people travelled abroad. The man who changed all this and brought in the age of mass tourism was Thomas Cook.

Thomas Cook was a printer in Leicester, England and the secretary of a local church organisation. In 1841 it was his job to arrange rail travel for members of his church to a meeting in Loughborough, a round trip of twenty-two miles. This was the world’s first package tour. (2) _________ this first success, he organised many more for his church. Then in 1845 he advertised a package tour to Liverpool for the general public, and before it took place he went to Liverpool to meet the hotel staff, and check the accommodation and restaurants.

He (3) _________ started to organise trips all over Britain, including the Great Exhibition in London. In 1851 he published the world’s first travel magazine which had details of trips, advice to travellers and articles and reports about the places to visit.
In 1854 he abandoned his job as a printer. In 1855 he took his first group of tourists to Paris and later that year led a tour of Belgium, Germany and France. In 1863 he went to Switzerland and in 1864 to Italy.

By then he had a million clients. (4) __________ he opened an office in London, which his son John Mason managed. They introduced a circular ticket which gave the traveller a single ticket to cover one journey instead of a number of tickets from all the railway companies involved, and they organised a system of coupons which people bought at home and exchanged in the foreign country for a hotel room and meals.
In 1866 the first group of European tourists visited New York and the Civil War battlefields of Virginia. In 1868 the Cooks went to the Holy Land with tents (5) __________ there were no hotels there at that time.

After the Suez Canal opened in 1869, Cook created his own fleet of luxury boats to travel up the river Nile. It was dangerous to carry large amounts of cash, (6) __________ in 1874 Cook introduced an early form of traveller’s cheque, which travellers could cash at a number of hotels and banks around the world.
Thomas Cook died in 1892 at the age of 84, and his son John Mason seven years later. The age of the package tour and mass tourism was born.