The government has just announced that it is cutting the money it gives to the Influenza Research Centre. Complete these texts about it with an appropriate form of the verb given. Use the present perfect continuous if possible; if not, use the present perfect or past simple. Indicate where more than one of these tenses is possible.


It's remarkable to think that since 1950 influenza (1)_____ (claim) more than 50,000 lives in this country, and in 1957 alone around 6,000 people (2)_____ (die). But over the last 20 years we at the Centre (3) _____(make) considerable progress on understanding the illness. We (4) ____(produce) over a hundred books and articles reporting the results of our research and in 1995 they (5) _____ (award) the Nobel Prize for medicine to one of my colleagues. In our more recent work we _____(6) (look) into the effects of influenza on heart disease and we (7) (also explore) a possible link between climate change and the recent increase in the number of cases of influenza. It is a tragedy that the government (8) _____ (make) this decision now.