Q3 - Most employees spend their time

[hyewonkim89]

Hello!

It's such a shame I got one of the earlier questions wrong

But I still wanted to make sure I understand this question clearly.

The passage is saying,

efficient employees = ignore demands and spend their time on something else that can highly reward their employers if successful and risk of significant loss if unsuccessful.

So it sounds like the passage is saying the efficient employees take risks! Only the big risks!

(A) I picked this one the first time I did this problem because I thought it meant finishing a report the next day was ignoring the routine work and finishing newly given report - but I now see that nothing states that the report was a big project that can reward or hurt the employers

(B) It is talking about the opposite. The first part got me at first since it is talking about ignoring tasks the supervisor gave the employees, but the second part is saying employees should work on routine correspondence which is not what the principle is saying.

(C) is the right answer because the employee is missing a monthly routine meeting to deal with a 'major customer' who can benefit or hurt employers

(D) out of scope

(E) It is still following the deadlines and demands.

Please let me know if I'm understanding this right.

Thanks in advance!

[tommywallach]

Hey Hye,

Great work here. Your breakdown of the answer choices is perfect. The only recommendation I'd have is to avoid oversimplifying the principle. There are two rules here.

Efficient employees ignore unimportant tasks (even if assigned) and spend time on high-risk/high-reward projects.

And I'll go through the answers myself, just for fun:

(A) This has been assigned, so it doesn't fit. Also, as you said, there's no risk/reward. A single afternoon is actually a small project!

(B) This fits really well with the first part of the rule (you can ignore assigned tasks), but the job that employee does instead is even more useless than the assigned task!

(C) CORRECT. In this example, the employee is skipping an unimportant task in order to take on a major customer. Notice that there's no direct mention of high-risk, only high-reward (major customer).

(D) This doesn't fit either of the rules.

(E) This doesn't fit either of the rules either. In fact, it kinda contradicts the first one, because stuff with firm deadlines can be ignored, according to the prompt.

Hope that helps!

-t

[hyewonkim89]

Thank you so much! I wanted to make sure I understood everything correctly!