3. A decision at the margin aa Aa Maria is a hard-working freshman in college. One Saturday, she decides to work nonstop until she has answered 100 practice problems for her economics course. She starts work at 8:00 AM and uses a table to keep track of her progress throughout the day. She notices that as she gets tired, it takes her longer to solve each problem. Use this table to answer the following questions. Time __Total Problems Answered 8:00 AM 0 9:00 AM 40 10:00 AM 70 11:00 AM 90 Noon 100 ‘The marginal, or additional, gain from Maria's second hour of work, from 9:00 AM to 10:00 AM, is__30 Vv problems. ‘The marginal, or additional, gain from Maria's fourth hour of work, from 11:00 AM to noon, is__10 ¥_ problems. Explanation: Close © By 9:00 AM, Maria has answered 40 problems. By 10:00 AM, Maria has answered 70 problems. So the marginal, or additional, gain from her work between 9:00 AM and 10:00 AM is 70 ~ 40 = 30 problems. By 11:00 AM, Maria has answered 90 problems, By noon, Maria has answered 100 problems. So the marginal, or additional, gain from the fourth hour, 11:00 AM to noon, is 100 - 90 = 10 problems. Later, the teaching assistant in Maria's economics course gives her some advice. "Based on past experience," the teaching assistant says, "working on 25 problems raises a student's exam score by about the sare amount as reading the textbook for one hour." For simplicity, assume students always cover the same number of pages during each hour they spend reading. Given this information, if Maria's goal had been to use her four hours of study time to get the best exam score possible, how many hours should she have spent working on problems and how many should she have spent reading?Q Four hours working on problems, zero hours reading © Three hours working on problems, one hour reading Q One hour working on problems, three hours reading ¥ © Two hours working on problems, two hours reading Explanation: Close © Maria should make her decision at the margin. Each hour, she should select the option that will improve her exam. grade by the largest amount. If she can do more than 25 problems in an hour, working on problems will help raise her grade more for that hour than reading will ‘The additional gain from the first hour is 40 problems. The additional gain from the second hour is 70 - 40 = 30 problems. She will stop here, since if she spends the third hour working on problems, she will get only 20 problems done. Therefore, she should stop working on problems and spend her remaining two hours reading Instead. Points: 9 - - Average: 3/3