Read the following text about water filter appearing in the early 20th century. Decide what words should be used in the gaps 1-15. ONLY ONE WORD in each gap. -- Water Filter - early 20th century Life was tough for many women in the countryside. The daily grind of household chores and childcare was 1.) .......... doubly difficult by poor housing, with homes often having no access to running water or decent sanitation. The Women’s Institute recognised this and, within just a few years of 2.) .......... formed, decided to put pressure on local councils to give rural families decent housing. In 1918, its members also pledged to persuade the government to bring piped water to every village dwelling. 3.) .......... its formidable sway, the WI was still battling the same issue three decades later. Determined to see change, it conducted a survey 4.) .......... the state of the nation’s water supply and sewerage. Thousands of villages responded to a detailed WI questionnaire, which asked about sanitary arrangements in local homes and schools. When the WI published its results in 1944, the country was stunned. As one MP remarked in a subsequent debate in the House of Commons: ’The Women’s Institutes are not generally a revolutionary body, but they have produced a revolutionary document’. Its collected data showed that facilities in at 5.) .......... three and a half thousand parishes were woefully inadequate. The survey revealed that a third of the nation’s countryside didn’t have access to clean, piped water. Sanitation was also deficient, with many rural villages relying on cesspits and earth closets little changed from medieval times. Almost every country printed the results of the WI report in its local newspaper, revealing wide disparities 6.) .......... regions. In January 1945, for example, the Leicester Evening Mail published the findings for Leicestershire and Rutland. They surprised even 7.) .......... most hardened journalist, who lamented ’the primitive conditions under which country people have to live and work’. A quarter of all the region’s village schools had no access to water at all. In one typical village, Great Dalby, the survey revealed that of its eighty homes, none were on main supplies and at least half of the women in the village had to carry their water from a pump more than 60 meters away. Nearly 85 per cent of the village’s homes were also classed as having ’unsatisfactory’ sanitary conditions. Of the few villages that were lucky enough to have piped water, the WI also found that most had their supplies cut off between 5pm and late morning, just the time when families needed it the most for bath-time and cooking. The water and sewage industries were highly fragmented right up until the end of the Second World War. The arrival of mains water and drainage to an area was often driven by industry and urban expansion, 8.) .......... than inherent wish to improve public health. Each region across the nation organised its own services, often with widely different geographical challenges and population numbers. At the time of the WI survey, there were more than a thousand private water companies and local authorities involved 9.) .......... the supply of the water, and another fourteen hundred responsible for sewage. With little coordination at a national or 10.) .......... regional level, the countryside’s plumbing lagged behind and was viewed as too difficult or unprofitable to update. Even well-to-do rural dwellers and farmers couldn’t magic piped water to their homes. Many had to rely on private wells and pumps to provide a personal supply of water, a situation that came 11.) .......... its own dangers. The 1930s had witnessed the last major outbreak of water-borne typhoid in the country but gastro-intestinal diseases caused by contaminated groundwater remained an ever-present threat. Those with the means bought rather grand charcoal water filters, 12.) .......... as the one by Cheavins. Started in the 1860s by Lincolnshire father-and-son team Squir and George Cheavin, the company went on to supply water filters to royalty, hospitals and governments across the British Empire well into the twentieth century. The carbon in the charcoal filter absorbed some impurities but unfortunately, did little about microbial contaminants such as bacteria. Something had to 13.) .......... done. Fortunately, the Women’s Institute survey marked a watershed. Just a few months later, in June 1945, the government passed legislation that triggered the beginning of a reliable nationalised water supply. 14.) .......... to the campaigning of countryside women, clean water now flowed 15.) .......... of whether you lived in London or a tiny Leicestershire village.
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