You will listen to a two- or three-minute recording of a lecture. You will then have to explain the concept or main idea of the extract.
The day of the exam: You will have 30 seconds to prepare your answer after the recording. You will have to speak for one minute.
Tip: Don’t hesitate to take notes during the recording. This will help you better structure your answer.
Using the points and examples from the lecture, explain the concept of opportunity cost, both in an economic and day-to-day context.
Explanation
Always make sure you fully explain the examples given, and how they relate back to the concept!
Suggestion
In the lecture, the professor states that opportunity cost is the potential loss or gain from choosing to do one thing and therefore not choosing to do another. She gives two main examples of this. The first one is one which relates to people’s everyday lives, that of watching a movie. The opportunity cost of choosing to watch one movie is that you could have used that time to study, work at a part-time job, or even watched a different movie instead. The other example is one from the world of business; sending an employee to buy office supplies incurs not just the direct cost of the supplies, but also the opportunity cost of the lost time of the employee, and the money paid to him during the time he was performing the task.