Question

1)

A decision at the margin

Paolo is a hard-working college sophomore. One Sunday, he decides to work nonstop until he has answered 250 practice problems for his math course. He starts work at 8:00 AM and uses a table to keep track of his progress throughout the day. He notices that as he gets tired, it takes him longer to solve each problem.

Time	Total Problems Answered
8:00 AM	0
9:00 AM	100
10:00 AM	175
11:00 AM	225
Noon	250

Use the table to answer the following questions.

The marginal, or additional, gain from Paolo’s first hour of work, from 8:00 AM to 9:00 AM, is____problems

.The marginal gain from Paolo’s third hour of work, from 10:00 AM to 11:00 AM, is____problems.

Later, the teaching assistant in Paolo’s math course gives him some advice. “Based on past experience,” the teaching assistant says, “working on 37.5 problems raises a student’s exam score by about the same amount as reading the textbook for 1 hour.” For simplicity, assume students always cover the same number of pages during each hour they spend reading.

Given this information, in order to use his 4 hours of study time to get the best exam score possible, how many hours should he have spent working on problems, and how many should he have spent reading?

A) 0 hours working on problems, 4 hours reading

B) 1 hour working on problems, 3 hours reading

C) 2 hours working on problems, 2 hours reading

D) 3 hours working on problems, 1 hour reading

Answer 1

1) The marginal, or additional, gain from Paolo’s first hour of work, from 8:00 AM to 9:00 AM, is 100 problems.

2)The marginal gain from Paolo’s third hour of work, from 10:00 AM to 11:00 AM, is 50 problems.

3)  in order to use his 4 hours of study time to get the best exam score possible he should go for 3 hours working on problems, 1 hour reading. because as has been mentioned in the above paragraph solving 37.5 problems will increase the score equal to 1 hour of study. in 3 hours of working on problems he has solved 225 problems which is around 6 hours of study so paolo should work on problems for 3 hours and read for 1 hour to get maximum score.