Part II Reading Comprehension (10’) Directions: Read the following passage and choose the best answer for each question. Stanley set his martini down, looked me in the eye, and said, “ So you made a mistake. You need to understand something important. And listen to me carefully: The road to success is paved with mistakes well handled. ” His words remained with me through the night. I repeated them over and over to myself, and it led to a turning point in the way I approached business. The problem wasn’t that I naively believed in perfection. Perfection is impossible in business. As a company policy, the notion of perfection can be dangerous, and the folly of pursuing it can stunt your team’s willingness to take intelligent risks. How could I expect my staff to create “ legends of hospitality ” if they were playing it safe by trying to avoid mistakes? Stanley’s lesson reminded me of something my grandfather Irving Harris had always told me: “ The definition of business is problems. ” His philosophy came down to a simple fact of business life: success lies not in the elimination of problems but in the art of creative, profitable problem solving. The best companies are those that distinguish themselves by solving problems most effectively. Indeed, business is problem solving. As human beings, we are all fallible . You’ve got to welcome the inevitability of mistakes if you want to succeed in the restaurant business — or in any business. It’s critical for us to accept and embrace our ongoing mistakes as opportunities to learn, grow, and profit. Baseball’s top hitters can make seven mistakes out of every ten at-bats, and still ride a .300 lifetime batting average into the Hall of Fame. We also need to expect the unexpected. We never know in advance if the next pitch will sail up and in or down and away. Will it be a fastball, a forkball, or a knuckleball? For us, the secret of the game is anticipating mistakes, harnessing them, and addressing them in constructive ways so that we end up in a better spot than if we had never made them in the first place.