For questions 1–8, read the text below and decide which answer best fits each gap. Tap a gap to choose your answer.
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An Ancient Martian Delta
For me, the (0) HIGHLIGHT of this month's science news was the panorama (1) back from a rover trundling across an ancient Martian delta, offering (2) geological evidence that a river once emptied into a lake there. This was hardly a bombshell; for generations, planetary scientists had argued that the fan-shaped deposits glimpsed from orbit could have formed no other way. The scientific case for it had been steadily (3) for years, as clays and carbonates were teased out of the data by hyperspectral instruments.
Even so, I suspect the sight of unmistakably water-lain (4) made the heart of more than one geologist (5) a beat. Ground truth at last. One could contend that the exploration of other worlds is, at least (6) part, a hunt for meaning - a way of locating ourselves within a grander cosmology. Yet our bond with the night sky is forged not only by science but by art. Little wonder, then, that images of planetary landscapes have for centuries (7) artists with inspiration, from Galileo - whose earliest sketches of the moon seen through a telescope are (8) beautiful - to contemporary painters whose visions of those same worlds are far more abstract.