a new slant on gap fills?

There are thousands of examples of gap fills on the net. As a developing teacher you have to ask yourself, what purpose do they serve? Why do so many language teachers design them? I think partly it is the low cost and low maintenance nature of them but also perhaps there is a testing dimension to them too. The main criticism of gap fills is the low contextual environment they provide, often there is more than one word that can be inserted due to the lack of context. Below is perhaps one possible solution to that. The idea came from Jamie Keddie and he has other examples on his blog but here I have a few examples. What do you think? How could they be used? What is the language point?