Business Concepts & Jargon Quiz — 7 Free Questions

Question 1

Which financial statement, also known as the profit and loss account, reports a company's sales, its costs and the profit or loss left over across a period such as a quarter or a year?

Question 2

What is the name for the takeover defence in which a company's board gives every shareholder except a hostile bidder the right to buy new shares at a steep discount the moment the bidder's stake crosses a set threshold?

Question 3

What is the name for the set of controllable elements a company combines to sell a product, traditionally summed up as four words beginning with the letter P: product, price, place and promotion?

Question 4

What is the name for building a company using only the founders' own savings and the cash the business itself generates, taking no outside investment so as to keep full ownership and control?

Question 5

What is the name for investment firms that raise pools of money from pension funds and other institutions, use it to buy whole companies outright, often loading them with debt, restructure them over a handful of years, and sell them on for a profit?

Question 6

What is the name for the financial arrangements, such as deferred bonuses, stock options that vest only after years, or a cheap loan tied to employment, that are designed to make it painfully expensive for a valued employee to leave?

Question 7

What is the name for an acquisition made mainly to bring the target company's staff, especially its engineers, onto the buyer's payroll, with the product and customers often wound down soon after the deal closes?

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About Business Concepts & Jargon

This quiz, the last in the Money, Business and Economics set, is about the working vocabulary of running a company: the language of the accounts, of corporate structure and takeovers, of strategy consultants, of startups and venture capital, and of the marketing and human-resources and project-management jargon that fills the modern office. One hundred questions, each describing a term from a definition and asking you to name it from four choices of the same kind, then explaining it.

The first pack is accounting and the financial statements: the balance sheet, the income statement and the cash flow statement, assets and liabilities and equity, EBITDA, depreciation and amortisation, working capital, goodwill, accruals, the audit, the two big rulebooks, and the price-to-earnings and earnings-per-share measures. The second pack is corporate structure and dealmaking: limited liability, the board and the C-suite, holding companies and subsidiaries and joint ventures, mergers and hostile takeovers and the defences against them, due diligence, term sheets, leveraged and management buyouts, fiduciary duty, ESG and dual-class shares. The third pack is strategy frameworks and consulting jargon: the four-box analysis, the five forces, the value chain, the growth grids, the moat, first-mover advantage, core competencies, the scorecard, targets and objectives, disruptive innovation and the innovator's dilemma, the blue ocean and the long tail and the flywheel, and vertical integration and economies of scope. The fourth pack is startups and venture capital: bootstrapping, the pitch deck, the minimum viable product, product-market fit, the pivot, runway and burn rate, the cap table and pre-money valuation, the down round, angels and accelerators, unicorns, churn and customer economics, the rule of forty, the standard early-stage contract, the acquihire and the exit. The fifth pack is marketing and workplace jargon: the four Ps, the unique selling proposition, segmentation, the funnel, the loss leader, freemium and razor-and-blades pricing, planned obsolescence, the loyalty score, the Peter Principle and Parkinson's Law, micromanagement, the matrix organisation, quiet quitting, golden handcuffs, the improvement plan, agile working, the bullwhip effect, scope creep and synergy.

The wrong answers are always other terms of the same kind, so a firm grasp of the vocabulary is rewarded and a guess is quickly exposed. This quiz covers the language used inside a company; the broader ideas of economics are in the Economics Fundamentals quiz and the workings of stock markets are in Markets, Bubbles and Crashes. About a fifth of the questions carry a neutral photograph that fits any of the four options. Definitions have been checked against standard reference works.