3 . Directions: After reading the passage below, fill in the blanks to make the passage coherent and grammatically correct. For the blanks with a given word, fill in each blank with the proper form of the given word; for the other blanks, use one word that best fits each blank.
You may think that mom-and-pop stores are gradually dying out, giving way to chain stores and big business, 1 you would be wrong. The online shopping platform Taobao is a game changer and 2 (revolutionize) the way we buy and sell.
Taobao, or “treasure hunt”, recently became the largest e-commerce website in terms of traffic, surpassing Amazon. It has 190 million 3 (register) users and serves 4 (big) marketplace in the world. Half of China’s Internet users go to Taobao, either to browse, buy or sell, according to Web information company Alexa.
5 Taobao borrowed its original business model from eBay when it started up in 2003, the student soon became the master. Just three years later, eBay shut down its site and now Taobao controls about 80 percent of the country’s online shopping market.
It charges almost 6 to list items for sale and makes most of its money from advertising. It also plans to share transaction data with its users so they can cash it on buying trends. This allows anyone with an idea and a computer to start a viable business, doing away 7 the need for significant start-up capital. 8 opening up a store on the high street selling to passersby, the world is every Taobao user’s oyster.
A friend of mine is a typical. She opened up a store selling children’s clothing near Nuren Jie, 9 was a popular market in Beijing. It was not a great success but her online sales through Taobao went ballistic. She closed the store and is now e-commerce only.
Effectively, taobao has become the country’s high street, but with global reach. 10 China is the world’s manufacturing base, it is relatively easy for individuals to source cheap goods and sell at a reasonable markup. Micro-stores are opening in their thousands every day and delivering an amazing variety of goods.
