Use of English - Open Cloze

Supply Chain Fragility

In a post-scarcity economy, abundance may appear to have solved the old problem of shortage, but global supply chains remain surprisingly fragile. In the wake (0) OF recent disruptions, firms have discovered that efficiency alone does not guarantee resilience. Many networks rely on a small number of critical inputs, some (1) .......... are sourced from regions vulnerable to political or climatic shocks. Managers (2) .......... sometimes assume that digital visibility is enough, yet transparency by itself cannot prevent bottlenecks. At the behest (3) .......... investors, some companies have diversified suppliers, but others continue to depend on arrangements whose hidden weaknesses emerge only under stress. What these systems (4) .......... reveal, however, is the extent to which apparent abundance rests on narrow logistical margins. Warehouses once treated as wasteful are now being reconsidered, not because executives have become cautious, but because they have learned that just-in-time models can fail at the very moment (5) .......... demand spikes. Several emergency measures were introduced, many (6) .......... proved costly, and not all of them addressed the underlying problem. The lesson is that robustness depends less on speed (7) .......... on redundancy, a principle (8) .......... importance is easy to overlook in periods of apparent plenty.