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08 Jul 2023, 15:50
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zoezhuyan
Hello, zoezhuyan. It has been a while. For some reason, your query came through the general Request Expert Reply portal, not through a mention. Also, RonTargetTestPrep is no longer linked with an account. All of that said, I am unsure what question you may be referencing at the top of your post. However, I will say that stagnated in the context of the sentence you quoted does mean did not increase. The word has a negative connotation, as though something bad or unforeseen has prevented a positive anticipated or potential outcome from occurring. Here, the huge IT investments would have been expected to lead to increased productivity, but that, apparently, was not what happened.
If you are still hanging around the forum, good luck with your continued studies.
- Andrew
20 Jan 2025, 06:53
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The problem I have with this question RC38000-01.02 and the debate about whether or not the answer is C is that all the answers are bad. And i got 7/8 right I dont think that there is a lack of understanding present. But my issue with number 1 is that nothing was "unexpected." I think most people know that too much of a good thing is a bad thing and I would equate a paradox to a theory way more than I would with something unexpected. They then go on to explain exactly why it happened? so is it unexpected or are the managers making huge investments beyond their needs just dumb (I would say thats way more likely if we are thinking about the real world). Reading comprehension problems are inherently ridiculous after a certain level of difficulty. You can either agree with the question writer or not but when you get something like that wrong you dont leave thinking okay that's fair, you leave thinking that was a terrible question. i.e. RC38000-01.02
25 Jan 2025, 17:02
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The trick to improving at this point is to dig into the questions you miss until you're convinced that only one answer can be right. I can relate to the frustration, but C is the only answer that comes close to being supported, and we do not have to rely on what "most people know" or what exactly a paradox is. There's certainly no proof here that "too much of a good thing is a bad thing," nor is that needed for the answer. The solution is much simpler than that, and it always has to be! The kind of issues you're bringing up are just not what we're being asked to do on RC.
Let's look at how we might sum up the author's overall point. Despite a broad emphasis on IT success, we see that some firms invested heavily in IT without any corresponding increase in productivity. If these investments were valuable, why didn't they increase productivity? The author looks to resource-based theory for the answer: easily-replicated resources don't give advantage, even if they are valuable. Taken in today's terms, that might mean "Your company isn't going to succeed just because you use AI. Everyone else can easily do that, too."
So the author is looking to explain a disconnect between investment and result. C correctly says that the author is "providing an explanation." Why are the findings described as "unexpected"? Because the investments were made with an eye toward creating an advantage, and most of the existing literature emphasizes that those advantages do occur. That's why the term "paradox" was used; it seemed odd to observers that big investments didn't seem to yield anything. Further, in the second paragraph, observers wonder why investments that were valuable didn't create an advantage. This reflects an underlying assumption that they SHOULD have created advantage. So the "productivity paradox" described in p1 is showing an unexpected result: folks thought that these investments would help much more than they did.
As for the others, A and E seem to refer to tech broadly, without referencing the specific issue at hand. B says that there are competing theories, but there aren't. The only theory mentioned is "resource-based theory," and no one is opposing it. D fails for the same reason--no theory is getting knocked down here. We might use some of this data to oppose one theory or another, but the author isn't doing that at all in the passage, so that can't be their primary concern.
Let's look at how we might sum up the author's overall point. Despite a broad emphasis on IT success, we see that some firms invested heavily in IT without any corresponding increase in productivity. If these investments were valuable, why didn't they increase productivity? The author looks to resource-based theory for the answer: easily-replicated resources don't give advantage, even if they are valuable. Taken in today's terms, that might mean "Your company isn't going to succeed just because you use AI. Everyone else can easily do that, too."
So the author is looking to explain a disconnect between investment and result. C correctly says that the author is "providing an explanation." Why are the findings described as "unexpected"? Because the investments were made with an eye toward creating an advantage, and most of the existing literature emphasizes that those advantages do occur. That's why the term "paradox" was used; it seemed odd to observers that big investments didn't seem to yield anything. Further, in the second paragraph, observers wonder why investments that were valuable didn't create an advantage. This reflects an underlying assumption that they SHOULD have created advantage. So the "productivity paradox" described in p1 is showing an unexpected result: folks thought that these investments would help much more than they did.
As for the others, A and E seem to refer to tech broadly, without referencing the specific issue at hand. B says that there are competing theories, but there aren't. The only theory mentioned is "resource-based theory," and no one is opposing it. D fails for the same reason--no theory is getting knocked down here. We might use some of this data to oppose one theory or another, but the author isn't doing that at all in the passage, so that can't be their primary concern.
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