Gapped text

Choose which of the paragraphs (A-G) fit into gaps (1-6). There is one extra paragraph which you do not need to use.

Small talk at the First Tuesday Club.

In retrospect, wearing the red sticker was a mistake. As a journalist, I technically had no right to it – red stickers were supposed to be for bankers – but, once I’d put it on, people seemed to want to talk to me. They came in pairs. Keen young business people with the next Big Idea. Online petfood? Two-hour shirt delivery? They pinned me to the wall, slipped their business cards into my pocket an pushed business plans into my hand. With a red sticker, I was their man, their ticket to a fortune, and all they needed was a quick hit. Say 10 million or so.

27.- ____

At matchmaking club of more than 40,000 members, First Tuesday takes wannabe entrepreneurs and, with a little luck an hard work, aims to make them millionaires. Upon arrival, entrepreneurs are given green stickers, the bankers with funds to hand out read stickers and everyone else – lawyers, salesmen, consultants and journalists – yellow stickers.

28.- _____

A fashion for meetings like these grew from the spirit of entrepreneurs that blossomed around the internet in the late 1990s. The computer network that for 30 years had been the exclusive club of a few physicists suddenly became available to the rest of us when a young Englishman named Tim Berners-Lee invented a way to share documents and pictures between users. In a move never properly acknowledged, Berners-Lee did something special: he gave the technology away for free and the World Wide Web was born.

29.- _____

The theory is enticing: anyone with anything to sell, from carpet weavers in Peru to English steelworks, can reach the whole world with just a simple website. Outsource – in other words, get someone else to worry about – your delivery problem and a multi-million pound business can be run from your bedroom.

30.- _____

Indeed, size would be a disadvantage in the new economy. Why incur the cost of building a network of stores when a website, a warehouse and a way to deliver are sufficient? The problem was that anyone with an interest in the internet was unlikely to know anything about venture capital and, even if they did, the venture capitalists were not interested in technobabble speaking geeks.

31.- _____

So, in October ten years or so ago, some entrepreneurs held a party. They realized putting people with ideas in the same room as people with money, shutting the doors could be the recipe for something special. It was an instant success. The casual atmosphere took away the pressure from both sides and now anyone with an idea, no matter how crazy, could meet as many bankers as they could handle It an evening. Within months, First Tuesday events were appearing everywhere. Now First Tuesday is the traditional rite of the first meeting are long since up and running today’s attendees are the rest of us.

32.- _____

Then the lucky ones will be emailed back with details of the next get-together and their invite to untold riches.

A.- Then, as now, the bankers didn’t quite understand these people. They’d help them, but they didn’t want them in the house. What was needed was neutral territory – somewhere for the two camps to meet, where neither would feel overwhelmed.

B.- Put them all in the same room, dim the lighting, add canapes and cocktails, and a few inspirational speeches to set the mood, then sit back and let nature take its course.

C.- The popularity of the evenings and the number of people with business plans is such that the green-stickered hopefuls forever outnumber the red-stickered bankers. Sticker hunting is the new blood sport and many red stickers try to hide their true identity.

D.- No need for expensive shops, no need for hundreds of employees, no need for middlemen to eat into your profits. With everyone’s shopfront restricted to the size of the PC screen, there is no advantage in being a global giant.

E.- Anyone can apply – the student with his loan cheque for capital; the pensioner with a clever idea; the mad, the bad and the just plain hopeful – all they have to do is log on to First Tuesday’s website, register their interest and wait.

F.- She was a precocious child. From a handful of particle physics notes in December 1990, the Web grew to more than a billion pages in less than a decade. As with all things human, it wasn’t long before people began to see that the Web offered more than a vast global library: maybe you could make money too. E-commerce was about to begin.

G.- It was the First Tuesday of last month when, like every month, thousands of hopeful people converged, clutching business plans in sweat-stained folders, on venues in more than 50 cities around the world. They were there to get rich. They were there for First Tuesday.