Fill in the Blanks The Story of the Aral SeaOnline version Complete the text with the correct verb in past by Grecia Osorio Lezama 1 April 2010 One Sunday afternoon in Kazakhstan last August , a group of fishermen for a celebration . They on the shore of the North Aral Sea . They food to eat , and they races and throwing contests . Afterwards , they , telling stories and singing songs about the Aral Sea and fishing and how much they both of these things . Once , the Aral Sea in Central Asia the fourth largest lake in the world . However , it has almost disappeared because of irrigation and drought . In 2005 , the Kazakh government and the World Bank a dam that the northern and southern parts of the sea . The northern part of the Aral Sea has started to recover . There are fish in the water and for the past four years , fishermen have come to celebrate . Philip Micklin is a scientist who has been studying the sea since the 1980s . ? Nature can come back . ? he says . October 2014 Satellite images from this week show that the eastern part of the Aral Sea is completely dry . ? It is likely the first time it has completely dried up in 600 years , ? said expert Philip Micklin . The Aral Sea once had an area of 67 , 300 square kilometres . Two of Central Asia's biggest rivers , the Amu Darya and the Syr Darya , into the Sea . This means that it actually a freshwater lake , not a seawater lake . But it so big it was a sea . The Aral Sea to be a busy place . Almost 20 percent of the Soviet Union ? s fish from here and 40 , 000 people used to work near the lake . As the lake up , it into different parts . The eastern part nearly dried up in 2009 but it in 2010 after some rain . Now , it ? s completely dry . June 2015 Yusup Kamalov is a scientist from Uzbekistan . I am standing with him looking at a huge desert . Except that it ? s not like any other desert ? fifty years ago the southern shore of the Aral Sea right where we stand . Now it is 80 kilometres away to the northwest . We set off to drive to the water . On the way , we pass oil and natural gas rigs standing on the sand . According to Kamalov , each year there are a few more . ? Can you imagine , ? he says , ? that 40 years ago the water was 30 metres deep right here . ? We finally arrive at the edge of the lake , which is so salty that no fish can live in it . ? This is what the end of the world looks like , ? says Kamalov .
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