When your alarm went off this morning, you had a number of options open to you. Assuming you first chose to get out of bed, you could have chosen to go to school, watch TV, or go to the mall. Now, what is the opportunity cost of going to school? Is it both watching TV and going to the mall? No. Because of the scarcity problem, you would have only been able to do one of those options if you weren’t at school, so you are only giving up the opportunity to do one of them, more specifically the one you were most likely to do. So, if you were to place a value on your choices you would choose the activity you valued most, which was go to school, your opportunity cost would be the one on which you placed the next highest value—probably watching television.