3. Recently, a 62-mile section of highway between the Chinese cities of Beijing and Zhangjiakou became ensnarled in a massive traffic jam that took public safety officers nearly two weeks to break up. Traffic experts agree that this stretch of highway, which covers less than 0.7 square mile of area stretched thinly along the 62 miles, is often overburdened with much more traffic than it was designed to handle.

Most observers agree that this state of affairs has arisen because the people of China have allocated resources away from road construction in favor of building new manufacturing facilities. These facilities, though, churn out more products to be shipped by trucks that clog roads. Thus, in China the choice to build more factories to produce goods has entailed an opportunity cost: fewer roads for transporting those goods. What is an example of an opportunity cost that a trucker may have incurred by spending a full day traversing the traffic jam between Beijing and Zhangjiakou?