The production costs per week for generating x widgets is given by,
C ( x ) = 500 + 350 x - 0.09 x2 , 0 ≤ x ≤ 1000
Answer following questions.
(a) What is the cost to generate the 301st widget?
(b) At x = 300 what is the rate of change of the cost?
Solution
(a) We can't only compute C (301) as that is the cost of generating 301 widgets whereas we are looking for the actual cost of generating the 301st widget. In other terms, what we're looking for here is,
C (301) - C (300) = 97, 695.91 - 97, 400.00 + 295.91
Thus, the cost of generating the 301st widget is $295.91.
(b) In this part all we have to do is get the derivative and then calculate C′ (300) .
C′ ( x ) = 350 - 0.18x ⇒ C′ (300) = 296.00