2015 - WAEC Economics Past Questions and Answers - page 1

Economics is regarded as a science because it uses scientific methods to build theories that can help explain the behaviour of individuals, groups and organisations. Economics attempts to explain economic behaviour, which arises when scarce resources are exchanged.

Land, sometimes referred to as dry land, is the solid surface of Earth that is not permanently covered by water and is immovable

Increases in the production possibilities curve are represented by shifts outward, or to the right, while decreases are represented by shifts inward, or to the left.

When using a PPc, growth is defined as an increase in potential output over time, and illustrated by an outward shift in the curve. An outward shift of a PPc means that an economy has increased its capacity to produce all goods.

Economic systems are the means by which countries and governments distribute resources and trade goods and services. They are used to control the five factors of production, including: labor, capital, entrepreneurs, physical resources and information resources. An economic system is a system of production, resource allocation, exchange and distribution of goods and services in a society or a given geographic area.

The important disadvantage of mean is that it is sensitive to extreme values/outliers, especially when the sample size is small. Therefore, it is not an appropriate measure of central tendency for skewed distribution. Mean cannot be calculated for nominal or nonnominal ordinal data.

middlemen intervention raise price for consumers. The real profit goes to the middlemen who buy up the farm products at almost give away prices and sell at outrageous prices to the consumers. 

 if the cost of resources used to produce a good increases, sellers will be less inclined to supply the same quantity at a given price, and the supply curve will shift to the left. 

 An uncommonly high product demand that is outside the normal parameters established by the management policy is called anAbnormal Demand.

A Giffen good, in economic theory, is a good that is in greater demand as its price increases. For example, if the price of an essential food staple, such as rice, rises it may mean that consumers have less money to buy more expensive foods, so they will actually be forced to buy more rice.

Subsidy impact. Marginal subsidies on production will shift the supply curve to the right until the vertical distance between the two supply curves is equal to the per unit subsidy; when other things remain equal, this will decrease price paid by the consumers (which is equal to the new market price) and increase the price received by the producers.

In most cases, the supply curve is drawn as a slope rising upward from left to right, since product price and quantity supplied are directly related (i.e., as the price of a commodity increases in the market, the amount supplied increases, and at a lower price, supply decreases).