Benchmarking

The answer to yesterday's question is b) because the speaker confused the word anymore with already. Sometimes Non Native speakers completely misuse words as illustrated in yesterdays entry. But at other times only a slight difference in meaning is apparent at first glance. Take the word benchmark. A student recently said that his company was benchmarking other firms in their industry in order to develop a better sales campaign. After eliciting more information from him it was clear that he understood the general meaning of the word (e.g., to measure the performance of a given good or service against an accepted standard of excellence); however, he did not quite get the nuance of the word benchmark. The difficulty of course is that most of the time we talk about a benchmark(s) in business, we are referring to standards that were developed by an industry, organization (like ISO) or academia.
Whatever the case, he was not benchmarking other companies. He was, in reality, researching them and doing the expected Due Diligence.

He's Not here Anymore

A friend of mine dropped by a colleague's place of work to say hi. She asked the receptionist if Tom was still in. The receptionist answered: "Tom is not here anymore." My friend July was very confused. She had spoken to Tom on the phone not 2 days before and he had said that he was working at Acme Inc. Indeed, that was one of the main reasons July had decided to stop by Acme Inc. in the first place. Perplexed, she asked the receptionist "when did he leave?" to which the answer was "about 30 minutes ago". July being a clever person instantly realized that:

a) Tom had just been laid off/fired
b) Tom had finished for the day
c) Tom had just quit
d) None of the above

The answer is____
Why:

Come back tomorrow for the answer