risk-taking

comparative more risk-taking · superlative most risk-taking · alternative risktaking

1. Prone to engaging in risky behaviour or unafraid to do things with uncertain outcomes.

   At a cost of an estimated $9 million, The Hire series consists of short movies (five or six minutes) about a risk-taking professional driver driving a BMW.

   2008, John Vernon Pavlik, Media in the Digital Age, Columbia University Press, published 2008, →ISBN, page 159

   2 more examples

   We're actually quite a risk-taking species, as species go: and because of that we've managed, in the space of little more than 100,000 years, to go from being a bunch of monkeys (hominids, if you want to be strictly correct about this) somewhere in Africa to more or less total world domination. Not to mention flying to the moon.

   2008, Warwick Cairns, How to Live Dangerously: Why We Should All Stop Worrying, and Start Living, Macmillan, published 2008, →ISBN

   “We are a risk-taking organization,” Kirk said. “We are doing multimillion-dollar deals. We guarantee loans. We could fail. But my view is that Bob Dylan thing, 'He not busy being born is busy dying.'”

   2011, Barry Estabrook, Tomatoland: How Modern Industrial Agriculture Destroyed Our Most Alluring Fruit, Andrews McMeel, published 2011, →ISBN, page 172

alternative risktaking

1. uncountableThe practice or tendency of doing things that are risky or have uncertain outcomes.

   During the development era, Koreans seem to have ignored the increase of risks and, at times, appear to have considered high-stakes risk-taking as heroic.

   2010, Jaeyeol Yee, “Risk Governance in a Double Risk Society: From System Failure to Unknown Complexities”, in Raymond K. H. Chan, Lillian Lih-Rong Wang, Mutsuko Takahashi, editors, Risk and Public Policy in East Asia, Ashgate, →ISBN, page 174

   2 more examples

   Unfortunately, these are the types of risks kids and teens are most likely to take, when risk-taking can seem like a cool way to be independent or escape problems.

   2007, David E. Woodward, quoted in I've Got This Friend Who: Advice for Teens and Their Friends on Alcohol, Drugs, Eating Disorders, Risky Behavior, and More (ed. Anna Radev), Hazelden (2007), page 48

   They are similar mainly in the characteristics that brought them together—a positive (or negative) attitude toward schoolwork, in the case of the children in Kindermann's study, or a penchant for risk-taking, in the case of the antisocial gangs.

   2009, Judith Rich Harris, The Nurture Assumption: Why Children Turn Out the Way They Do, Free Press, published 2009, →ISBN, page 363