Friday, February 08, 2008

Quizzes from Tuesday -

The yellow question seems to have caused the most confusion. I think people just were not reading it completely:

"Suppose that, on the basis of a nation's PPC, an economy must sacrifice 10,000 pizzas domestically to get the 1 additional robot it desires, but can get the robot from another country for 9,000 pizzas. Relate this information to the following statement: 'Through international specialization and trade, a nation can reduce it's opportunity cost of obtaining goods and thus move outside its PPC.'"


Check a couple of things here:
~Nowhere is it asking you to figure out the trade matrix - it is not necessary to answer the question
~Nowhere does it say that the robot helps make pizzas - they are unrelated
~What is it asking?

Don't get caught up in superfluous information. There's a lot of it in this question.

What is it asking? What is the answer?

4 comments:

Tanvirkamal said...

I think that due to my simple mind, I understand this much easier than my classmates, because I have noticed that they tend to over think alot, and then sometimes that over thinking is considered under thinking. It is really easy stuff to get, as long as you don't try to over due it, whatever your first answer is, stick with it when you change it is your leading to over thinking. This is calc or english!

martywiese said...

So it's pretty much only asking for information to back up the statement: 'Through international specialization and trade, a nation can reduce it's opportunity cost of obtaining goods and thus move outside its PPC,'? I never actually had the Yellow Quiz, but it looks like if that's the case, all you have to say is that the opportunity cost for making robots domestically is higher than the opportunity cost of specializing in making pizzas and trading them for robots?

Correct me if I'm wrong. I guess I just want to understand this question that everyone else thought was so insanely difficult. It seems my answer is over-simplified.

martywiese said...

By the way, I have a blog now. I forgot to post that last week.

KM said...

Yep - both of you are right. Some people are overthinking it.

OC is higher domestically, so trading is a better idea. By trading, you can actually consume OUTSIDE your PPC (in that "overuse" area) because you are producing on the PPC with the resources you have - with trade, you're still using the resources you have, but you're consuming at a point outside of that PPC.

It's a lesson in making sure to read the question.