Read the following passage and mark the letter A, B, C, or D on your answer sheet to indicate the correct word or phrase that best fits each of the numbered blanks

Internet Business

In the mid to late 1990s, thousands of new companies were set up with one purpose: to benefit from the explosion of interest in the internet. Large corporations were happy to invest millions in the weirdest website ideas, confident that they would make a (26) _______ over time. Most of them didn’t. Indeed, the vast majority of them have gone bust, leaving their investors severely out of pocket. So what went wrong?

The main mistake that companies made was to forget to ask how their dot com company (as internet- based companies are sometimes called) would actually make a profit. It sounds fairly obvious now, but in the rush to ‘get on the net’, the whole concept was (27) _______. There was also a second problem (28) _______ dot coms did not anticipate. Yes, internet traffic was increasing enormously, (29) _______ people still felt uncomfortable - many still do, in fact - about buying products and services online. Even if the dot coms had come up with sensible business ideas, it’s unlikely they would have brought in enough to cover their initial investment.

There were (30) _______ exceptions , of course. Some companies have been hugely successful on the internet. Most, however, found it wasn’t as easy to run an internet business as they'd thought.

(Adapted from Laser B2 by Malcomn Mann and Steve Taylor-Knowles)