Thread: Help with an economics question?

Hi there,

I missed my last Microeconomics class due to travel plans and have no idea how to set up this problem. Could you possibly help me get started on this or send me an explanation of a similar problem?

Here it is:

Maria can read either 20 pages of economics or 50 pages of sociology in an hour. She spends 5 hours per day studying.
a. Graph her production possibilities frontier per day for reading these subjects.
b. What is Maria’s opportunity cost for reading 100 pages of sociology? Explain.


Kindest thanks,

Annalea

Annalea:

(a) wants a graph of how she could spend the 5 hours studying. one axis would have the pages of econ, the other would have sociology. on one end of the graph, she would spend the whole 5 hours reading econ(100 pages), and 0 hours reading sociology(0 pages). on the other end of the graph, she'd spend 0 hours reading econ (0 pages), and 5 reading sociology (250 pages). you'd draw a line from one point to the other.

here is an image of the problem: http://cdis.missouri.edu/exec/data/c.../UFig02_03.gif

(b) is asking : how long does it take for Maria to read 100 pages of sociology? if she can read 50 pages in one hour, then that means it would take her 2 hours to read 100 pages.

now, in that same 2 hours , how many pages of economics could she have read? well, according to the problem, at 20 pages per hour, she could have read 40 pages of economics in that 2 hours.

so the opportunity cost is 40 pages of economics.

Originally Posted by headabovewater

Annalea:

(a) wants a graph of how she could spend the 5 hours studying. one axis would have the pages of econ, the other would have sociology. on one end of the graph, she would spend the whole 5 hours reading econ(100 pages), and 0 hours reading sociology(0 pages). on the other end of the graph, she'd spend 0 hours reading econ (0 pages), and 5 reading sociology (250 pages). you'd draw a line from one point to the other.

here is an image of the problem: http://cdis.missouri.edu/exec/data/c.../UFig02_03.gif

(b) is asking : how long does it take for Maria to read 100 pages of sociology? if she can read 50 pages in one hour, then that means it would take her 2 hours to read 100 pages.

now, in that same 2 hours , how many pages of economics could she have read? well, according to the problem, at 20 pages per hour, she could have read 40 pages of economics in that 2 hours.

so the opportunity cost is 40 pages of economics.

Yay! Thank you. This makes so much more sense now.