Data-Based Business Decisions Answers

Which part of the decision-making process is directly related to brainstorming?

The following graph shows the sales records of four employees over a period of six months. Which employee experienced the single greatest decline in sales between two months?

You are the manager of a clothing store. You must decide how many of your employees to put on the sales floor, and how many to put on the register. Because employees on the sales floor cause customers to buy more products, if you do not have at least 2 employees on the register for every 5 employees working on the sales floor, your registers will get very clogged and you will lose business. You have a total of 84 employees, and you wish to have as many on the sales floor as possible. How should you divide your employees?

The following graph shows Caroline’s sales records since she started her position 22 months ago. Caroline’s two managers, Shawna and Morris, are having a meeting to discuss her performance. To prepare, Morris looks at Caroline’s sales over the past four months, and Shawna looks at Caroline’s total records. How is Shawna’s opinion likely to differ from Morris’s?

Tony is the staff manager of a movie theater, and he is trying to decide which shifts should have the greatest number of employees on staff. Over the course of a week, Tony recorded how many customers appeared during each shift, the results of which can be seen in the graph below. Tony wants the distribution of his employees to match the distribution of the customers. If Tony has 230 total employees, how many should he assign to the 1:00 p.m. shift?

Jake has decided to give a bonus to the employee who has worked the greatest total number of hours over the past six months. Four candidates are currently up for consideration. The following graph shows how many hours each one has worked over the past six months. To which employee will Jake give the bonus?

Natasha is a regional manager for a chain of supermarkets. She has been tasked with researching the weekly sales records of two branch locations over the past month, which she must present to her board of directors. She was able to assemble the relevant information in the table below, but it is scrambled and hard to read. Sales are listed in thousands of dollars. Week 4 1 1 3 4 2 3 2 Sales 16.3 17.8 23.1 15.2 20.2 23.4 22.9 17.6 Branch North South North South South North North South In order to make the data more readable, Natasha has decided to put it into a graph. Which of the following graphs accurately matches the information in the table? I. II. III. IV.

In the article, “Visual Business Intelligence”, Stephen Few claims that visualization analysis and presentation tools are important to a business decision-maker since they _____.

Hector has started growing orchids in a greenhouse. He has kept a record how many new blossoms his orchids have grown each week, which may be seen in the graph below. Between which two weeks did the greatest increase in new blossoms occur?

The following graph details the number of performances of plays a Shakespearean acting company has performed over the past five years. If the company has performed 147 times in the past five years, how many times have they performed Othello? Round to the nearest whole performance, if necessary.