Read the passage and mark the letter A, B, C or D on your answer sheet to indicate the best answer to each of the following questions from 1...

Read the passage and mark the letter A, B, C or D on your answer sheet to indicate the best answer to each of the following questions from 1 to 8.

        The Covid-19 pandemic shook global supply chains to their core, and they have not yet fully recovered. Managers who once embraced lean, just-in-time routines often overcorrected toward ad-hoc, ill-defined “just-in-case” practices. The result was a glut: inventories surged across retail, wholesale, and manufacturing, even as the Business Confidence Index and Consumer Confidence Index swung erratically. With sentiment oscillating, planning horizons shrank, and contingency policies multiplied; yet crude stockpiles proved a blunt instrument rather than a nuanced hedge against uncertainty.

        When confidence whipsaws from month to month, the signal-to-noise ratio collapses and planning becomes brittle. When confidence lurches from month to month, planning grounded in stale numbers becomes perilous. Firms that chase yesterday’s indicators risk mistiming production, booking capacity at the wrong moment, or amplifying volatility through panic ordering. Some stabilize operations by pacing commitments, sequencing replenishment windows, and letting buffers breathe; nonetheless, a failure to discriminate between genuine demand and transient noise can still cascade through warehouses and storefronts.

        In apparel, the problem is magnified by time: buyers must place peak-season orders roughly six months ahead of shelves. With volatility high, June forecasts can diverge sharply from December realities. If predictions undershoot, stockouts surface and a coveted season is missed; if they overshoot, excess piles up and January brings bruising markdowns. Long lead times, once tolerable under steadier conditions, now act like an echo chamber, turning small misreads into outsized consequences that are difficult to reverse mid-cycle.

        Overstocking, then, is a costly insurance policy, not resilience itself. Durable resilience is quieter: calibrated safety stock, disciplined scenario thinking, and clearer sensing of genuine demand. Rather than hoarding, firms experiment with shorter decision cadences, staged commitments, and transparent thresholds that trigger adjustments. Where planning must be conditional, governance should be explicit; where buffers must exist, they should be measured. In turbulent markets, prudence lies less in volume than in timing, discrimination, and the agility to unwind missteps swiftly.

(Adapted from Harvard Business Review, “Using Technology to Improve Supply Chain Resilience,” Sept. 2023)

Question 1. The word ad-hoc in paragraph 1 can be best replaced by ______?

A. improvised                B. deliberate                        C. standardized                D. prescheduled