A s you read the chapter, consider how you would answer the following questions. You should not necessarily be able to answer the questions be-fore you read the chapter. Rather, you should use them to get a sense of the issues covered in the chapter. After reading the chapter, you should be able to give at least partial answers to the questions, and you should be able to give better answers after the chapter has been dis-cussed in class. Note, too, that it is often useful, when answering conceptual questions, to use hypothetical data to illustrate your answer. (There is no model on the textbooks Web site for these Beginning-of-Chapter Questions.)

1 Is bankruptcy a fairly common occurrence among large companies, or is it restricted primarily to small firms?