Unit 3

Job Interview

Author Profile

• Nickname: Mr. Make Things Happen

• founder and chairman of Mackay Envelope Company, a $100 million business!!!

• one of the most in-demand speakers and writers in the US

• a time-management freak

Quotes from Harvey Mackay• Find something you love to do and you'll never have

to work a day in your life.• We all start out in life with one thing in common; We

all have the same amount of time. It's just a matter of what we do with it.

• Are you worried about pressure? I look at it this way: Pressure is having to do something you are not totally prepared to do.

• It isn't the people you fire who make your life miserable, it's the people you don't.

• Being rich isn't about money. Being rich is a state of mind. Some of us, no matter how much money we have, will never be free enough to take time to stop and eat the heart of the watermelon. And some of us will be rich without ever being more than a paycheck ahead of the game.

Text Organization

• Part one: Paras 1-6 A recent college

graduate failed to answer the questions at an interview because of lack of preparation.

Text Organization

• Part two: Paras 7-27• Four pieces of advice

on being a successful interviewee.

Text Organization

• Part three: Paras 28-31• Everyone should make

his or her own tracks in whatever he or she does.

Language Study• employee• interviewee• trainee• Examinee• retiree• Payee• refugee• absentee

Language Study• grill: question intensely (used in the

pattern: grill sb. about / on sth.)

• Tom was grilled by customs officers for several hours.

• The senior detective grilled the young suspect about the robbery case.

Language Study• grill: cook under or over direct heat

• We can grill the chops on the barbecue.

Language Study• follow up: take additional steps to

further (a previous action) (followed by with)

• If you make a hotel booking by phone, follow it up with written confirmation.

• We are worried that terrorists will follow up their threats with bomb attacks.

Language Study• in sb.’s hand: in sb.’s possession

• His father’s company has been in his hands for some years.

• have/ hold/ keep (sb.) in hand 掌握 , 支配( 某人 )

• at sb.'s hands 从某人手里 在某人手下• on sb.'s hands 由 ... 照管 ; 由 ... 负责• off sb.'s hands 脱手 , 卸脱责任

Language Study• prospective: likely to become or be

• prospective advantages 预期的利益• prospective bride/bridegroom 未来的新

娘 / 郎• a prospective buyer 可能的买主 • a prospective employee 准雇员• prospects for success (para. 12)

Language Study• prospective:

• The chief function of direct-mail advertising is to familiarize prospective buyers with a product.

• The college had applications from nearly 300 prospective students.

Compare: perspective, prospective, respective

Language Study• endeavor: prolonged and industrial

effort

• In innovation as in any other endeavor, there is talent, there is ingenuity, and there is knowledge.

Language Study• do one’s homework: make

preparation beforehand

• He had done his homework before he delivered the speech.

Language Study• incidentally: by the way (used when

adding more information to what was said before, or when you want to talk about sth. else you have just thought of)

• Incidentally, this wine goes particularly well with cheese.

• Incidentally, if you want to see her again, let me know.

Language Study• bracket: a category of people or things

that are similar• the upper income bracket 高收入人群• It was Beatty’s first movie and he had

sprung from nowhere into the superstar bracket.

• We begin paying income tax at 25 percent once we move into the tax bracket.

Language Study• take a crack at sth.: try to do sth.

• Although he qualified for a few regional events, he was aiming much higher: he wanted to take a crack at the Olympic championship.

• This is her first crack at writing a book.

Language Study• filthy: very dirty

• filth language• filthy habit• in filthy temper

Language Study• sport: wear or display

• A couple of them sported bruised faces, and one was limping.

• She was smoking a small cigar and sported a face that was a lot less elegant than the hat.

sport

• Japan’s famed “Maid Café”, featuring coy young girls serving tea in frilly apron and bonnets, have been given a new twist—a café of unsmiling, grim-faced grannies to reflect a fast-graying nation. … The “grannies” range from 24 to 77 years old, with the younger matriarchs sporting heavy make-up to look old.

• 在日本著名的“女仆咖啡厅”，服务员通常是害羞的年轻女孩，身穿皱边围裙、头戴女仆帽。而现在“女仆咖啡厅”有了“升级”版本 ----“ 老奶奶女仆咖啡厅”，服务员是不苟言笑的“奶奶”，以反映日本快速老龄化的现状。“女仆”的年龄从24 岁到 77 岁不等，年轻服务员需要化妆成老奶奶的模样。

Language Study• bulletproof:• waterproof• fireproof• foolproof• childproof

Language Study• blurt: utter abruptly and thoughtlessly

(blurt sth. out)• Peter blurted the secret (out) before we

could stop him. • As soon as the teacher put forward the

question, he blurted the answer out.

Language Study• pry: try to look into private facts about a

person (used in the pattern: pry into sth.)• We don’t want people prying into our

affairs.• Some reporters like to pry into film stars’

private life.• It affects the quality of life of everybody

because nobody can be sure their calls are safe from prying ears.

Language Study• in the neighborhood of: about, close

to, approximately

• I am hoping to buy an apartment in the neighborhood of 200,000 yuan.

• The painting is worth something in the neighborhood of $30,000.

15 Google Interview Questions That Will Make You Feel Stupid

How many golf balls can fit in a school bus?

• Job: Product Manager

Answer• This is one of those questions Google asks just to see if the applicant can explain the key

challenge to solving the problem.• Reader Matt Beuchamp came up with a dandy answer, writing:• I figure a standard school bus is about 8ft wide by 6ft high by 20 feet long - this is just a

guess based on the thousands of hours I have been trapped behind school buses while traffic in all directions is stopped.

That means 960 cubic feet and since there are 1728 cubic inches in a cubit foot, that means about 1.6 million cubic inches.

I calculate the volume of a golf ball to be about 2.5 cubic inches (4/3 * pi * .85) as .85 inches is the radius of a golf ball.

Divide that 2.5 cubic inches into 1.6 million and you come up with 660,000 golf balls. However, since there are seats and crap in there taking up space and also since the spherical shape of a golf ball means there will be considerable empty space between them when stacked, I'll round down to 500,000 golf balls.

Which sounds ludicrous. I would have spitballed no more than 100k. But I stand by my math.

Of course, if we are talking about the kind of bus that George Bush went to school on or Barney Frank rides to work every day, it would be half that....or 250,000 golf balls.

How much should you charge to wash all the windows in Seattle?

• Job: Product Manager

Answer

• This is one of those questions where the trick is to come up with an easier answer than the one that's seemingly being called for. We'd say. "$10 per window."

In a country in which people only want boys…

• …every family continues to have children until they have a boy. If they have a girl, they have another child. If they have a boy, they stop. What is the proportion of boys to girls in the country?

• Job: Product Manager

Answer• This one caused quite the debate, but we figured it out

following these steps:• Imagine you have 10 couples who have 10 babies. 5 will be

girls. 5 will be boys. (Total babies made: 10, with 5 boys and 5 girls)

• The 5 couples who had girls will have 5 babies. Half (2.5) will be girls. Half (2.5) will be boys. Add 2.5 boys to the 5 already born and 2.5 girls to the 5 already born. (Total babies made: 15, with 7.5 boys and 7.5 girls.)

• The 2.5 couples that had girls will have 2.5 babies. Half (1.25) will be boys and half (1.25) will be girls. Add 1.25 boys to the 7.5 boys already born and 1.25 girls to the 7.5 already born. (Total babies: 17.5 with 8.75 boys and 8.75 girls).

• And so on, maintianing a 50/50 population.

How many piano tuners are there in the entire world?

• Job: Product Manager

Answer• We'd answer "However many the market dictates. If pianos need tuning once a week, and it takes an hour

to tune a piano and a piano tuner works 8 hours a day for 5 days a week 40 pianos need tuning each week. We'd answer one for every 40 pianos."

• On Wikipedia, they call this a Fermi problem.• The classic Fermi problem, generally attributed to Fermi,[2] is "How many piano tuners are there in Chicago

?" A typical solution to this problem would involve multiplying together a series of estimates that would yield the correct answer if the estimates were correct. For example, we might make the following assumptions:

• There are approximately 5,000,000 people living in Chicago.• On average, there are two persons in each household in Chicago.• Roughly one household in twenty has a piano that is tuned regularly.• Pianos that are tuned regularly are tuned on average about once per year.• It takes a piano tuner about two hours to tune a piano, including travel time.• Each piano tuner works eight hours in a day, five days in a week, and 50 weeks in a year.• From these assumptions we can compute that the number of piano tunings in a single year in Chicago is• (5,000,000 persons in Chicago) / (2 persons/household) × (1 piano/20 households) × (1 piano tuning per

piano per year) = 125,000 piano tunings per year in Chicago. And we can similarly calculate that the average piano tuner performs

• (50 weeks/year)×(5 days/week)×(8 hours/day)×(1 piano tuning per 2 hours per piano tuner) = 1000 piano tunings per year per piano tuner. Dividing gives

• (125,000 piano tuning per year in Chicago) / (1000 piano tunings per year per piano tuner) = 125 piano tuners in Chicago. A famous example of a Fermi-problem-like estimate is the Drake equation, which seeks to estimate the number of intelligent civilizations in the galaxy. The basic question of why, if there are a significant number of such civilizations, ours has never encountered any others is called the Fermi paradox.

Why are manhole covers round?• Job: Software Engineer

Answer

• So it doesn't fall through the manhole (when the plane ordinarily flush with the plane of the street goes perpendicular to the street.)

Design an evacuation plan for San Francisco

• Job: Product Manager

Answer

• Answer: Again, this one is all about the interviewer seeing how the interviewee would attack the problem. We'd start our answer by asking, "what kind of disaster are we planning for?"

How many times a day does a clock’s hands overlap?

• Job: Product Manager

Answer• 22 times. • AM • 12:00

1:05 2:11 3:16 4:22 5:27 6:33 7:38 8:44 9:49 10:55

• PM • 12:00

1:05 2:11 3:16 4:22 5:27 6:33 7:38 8:44 9:49 10:55

Explain the significance of "dead beef"

• Job: Software Engineer

Answer• Our (wrong) answer: Beef is always dead. Calling something "dead

beef" is redundant -- a no-no for coders.• The actual answer, from a reader:• DEADBEEF is a hexadecimal value that has was used in debugging

back in the mainframe/assembly days because it was easy to see when marking and finding specific memory in pages of hex dumps. Most computer science graduates have seen this at least in their assembly language classes in college and that's why they expect software engineers to know it. From wikipedia:

"0xDEADBEEF ("dead beef") is used by IBM RS/6000 systems, Mac OS on 32-bit PowerPC processors and the Commodore Amiga as a magic debug value. On Sun Microsystems' Solaris, it marks freed kernel memory. On OpenVMS running on Alpha processors, DEAD_BEEF can be seen by pressing CTRL-T.[3]"

A man pushed his car to a hotel and lost his fortune. What happened?

• Job: Software Engineer

Answer

• He landed on Boardwalk. (Painful, right?)

You need to check that your friend, Bob, has your correct phone number…• …, but you cannot ask him directly. You must write the

question on a card which and give it to Eve who will take the card to Bob and return the answer to you. What must you write on the card, besides the question, to ensure Bob can encode the message so that Eve cannot read your phone number?

• Job: Software Engineer

Answer

• Since you are just "checking," you ask him to call you at a certain time. If he doesn't, he doesn't have your number.

• Too simple? A reader suggest: "In that case you need a check-sum. Have Bob add all the digits of your phone number together, write down the total, and pass that back to you."

You're the captain of a pirate ship…• …and your crew gets to vote on how the gold is

divided up. If fewer than half of the pirates agree with you, you die. How do you recommend apportioning the gold in such a way that you get a good share of the booty, but still survive?

• Job: Engineering Manager

Answer

• You divide the booty evenly between the top 51% of the crew.

You have eight balls all of the same size…

• …7 of them weigh the same, and one of them weighs slightly more. How can you find the ball that is heavier by using a balance and only two weighings?

• Job: Product Manager

Answer

• Reader Hyloka nailed this one first:• Take 6 of the 8 balls and put 3 on each side of the

scale. If the heavy ball isn't in the group of 6, you know it's one of the remaining 2 and so you put those two in the scale and determine which one. If the heavy ball is in the 6, you have narrowed it down to 3. Of those 3, pick any 2 and put them on the scale. If the heavy ball is in that group of 2, you know which one it is. If both balls are of equal weight, then the heavy ball is the one you sat to the side.

You are given 2 eggs…• …You have access to a 100-story building. Eggs can be

very hard or very fragile means it may break if dropped from the first floor or may not even break if dropped from 100th floor. Both eggs are identical. You need to figure out the highest floor of a 100-story building an egg can be dropped without breaking. The question is how many drops you need to make. You are allowed to break 2 eggs in the process.

• Job: Product Manager

Answer

• From our own developer, Ian White:• For a 100-story building it'll take a maximum of 19 drops.

First you drop an egg every ten stories: floor 10, 20, 30, and so on until it breaks. In the worst-case scenario it breaks at floor 100, so that's 10 drops.

Then you drop the second egg every story, starting from 10 below where it broke: floor 91, 92, 93, and so on until it breaks. In the worst-case scenario you have to drop all the way up to 99, so that's 9 more drops.

Explain a database in three sentences to your eight-year-old nephew.

• Job: Product Manager

Answer

• The point here is to test the applicant's ability to communicate complex ideas in simple language. Here's our attempt, "A database is a machine that remembers lots of information about lots of things. People use them to help remember that information. Go play outside."

You are shrunk to the height of a nickel…

• … and your mass is proportionally reduced so as to maintain your original density. You are then thrown into an empty glass blender. The blades will start moving in 60 seconds. What do you do?

• Job: Product Manager

Answer

• This one is all about the judging interviewee's creativity. We'd try to break the electric motor.

Immersion

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