Advanced level
Read the text and then do the task below.

Are short sellers necessary?
By William Leith
Short selling is not like making a normal investment. When you make a normal investment, you buy something, hoping it will be more desirable in the future. This type of investment – 'going long' – seems to be about optimism and hope. With short selling, you look for something that you think is going to decline in value. Then you borrow some shares in that thing. Next, you sell those shares to someone who is more optimistic, or less discerning, than you. If you're right, and the shares plummet, you can buy them back for less than you sold them. If you're wrong, and they treble in value, you're bust, because you still owe the shares to their original owner.
Imagine if I go to a shop and see a big shelf of expensive handbags. Let's say I look at these handbags for a while and come to believe they're not worth anything like the price on the label. To me, they look like rubbish handbags. So, I go to the owner of the store and ask him, for a small fee, to borrow these handbags for a week. Then I take the bags out of the store and sell them to a trader for a fraction less than the price on the label. He’s happy – he thinks he can make a profit.
Six days later, I go to see him. I was right – the handbags were rubbish. He hasn't sold a single one. So, I make a deal – I'll buy them back for half of what I sold them for. Now he's happy to get rid of them. The next day, I go back to the store and return the bags to the owner. He’s happy, but maybe a little suspicious. That's short selling.
So, what's actually happened? I, the short seller, have spotted that somebody is charging a lot of money for handbags that are rubbish. Next, I've found somebody who is prepared to sell any old rubbish as long as he thinks there’s something in it for him.
Now, who are these short sellers? What sort of people are they likely to be? Well, they are people who see things that look good on the surface but are actually rubbish. They are people, in other words, who see the difference between the appearance and the reality. They are the first to notice when something is a con. Short sellers, in fact, reveal the problem. It was short sellers, apparently, who made people realise that Enron was a rubbish product. No, the problem is not the short sellers. It's the world of empty promises and false values that enables them to thrive. To ban them is to shoot the messenger.

Choose the correct alternative to complete these statements about the expressions in italic.
a) In short selling, you expect that the value of something will ...

b) If you go long, you buy something expecting that its value will ...

c) If someone is optimistic, they think the future will be ...

d) If someone is discerning, their judgement is ...

e) If the value of something plummets, it falls ...

f) If something trebles in value, it is worth ...

g) If someone is bust, they have ...