Lecture Extender Examples 513
Chapter 2 Scarcity and the World of Trade-Offs
At a college basketball game with only 25 seconds left, the home team, which is behind by 1 point,
steals the ball and calls time-
fight song to get the fans fired up behind the team, she gets a message over her headset telling her that
The Controversy over Offshore Drilling as a Reaction to Higher Gasoline Prices
In 2008, the price of gasoline rose to over $4.00 per gallon, and diesel climbed to more than $5.00 per
gallon. At the same time there was a presidential election in which this development became one of the
major issues. The Republicans favored rescinding a ban on offshore drilling for oil in most waters around
Continued Life versus the Environment
In the 1990s, it was discovered that taxol, a chemical found in the bark of Pacific yew trees in the Pacific
Northwest, was effective in treating ovarian cancer, which afflicts 10,000 women each year. It takes the
bark of about 150,000 yew trees per year to extract enough taxol to treat these women, many of whom
would otherwise die. The problem is that yew trees are slow growing and are mostly in old-growth forests
514 Miller Economics Today, Nineteenth Edition
The Opportunity Cost of Going to College
What is the cost of going to college? The obvious costs are the costs of tuition, fees, and textbooks. The
obvious costs of going to college do not include room and board because these costs will be incurred no
matter what you do go to work or go to school. The biggest cost of going to college is forgone income.
This is to say that going to college usually means sacrificing a full-time salary. In the case of a typical
Small-Business Entrepreneurs Create Most New Jobs for New Workers
Small-business entrepreneur-headed companies employing 500 or fewer workers account for about
99.7
The Opportunity Cost of Time Stuck in Traffic
Every year motorists spend about 3.7 billion hours waiting in gridlocked traffic. Policymakers commonly
argue that the explicit cost of time spent in traffic jams at least $6 billion spent on the $2.3 billion gallons
of fuel burned while engines idle is sufficiently high to justify building more highways. The implicit
