A brief history of apples

Do you always have a piece of fruit for your lunch? If you do, it's probably an apple! This is true particularly in places like western Europe, where apples have grown for hundreds of years. So it would be easy to (1)____ that's where they came from originally.

In fact, though, the fruit we know today has been on an extraordinary (2)____ over the centuries. Research suggests modern apples originally came all the way from Kazakhstan in Asia, and (3)____ up in Europe partly because of people carrying goods along the famous Silk Road, from western Europe all the way to China in the east. This helped to spread apples in both (4)____. People (5) ____ down their apples after they'd finished eating them, and the seeds entered the ground and produced new types of apple trees. Farmers were then able to start developing a much (6)____ range of apples.