[Math] Consumer surplus for demand curve at the given sales level $x$

calculus

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The square root is throwing me of doing the integration. Can someone please show the steps of integration.

Answer is $\$26.19$

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Ok then can someone show me how we got the integration here?

Best Answer

The height of the curve at $x = 50$ is $\sqrt{16 - 0.14\times50}=\sqrt{9}=3$. Thus, the consumer surplus will be given by $$ \int_0^{50}(p(x)-50)dx = \int_0^{50}\left[\sqrt{16 - 0.14x}-3\right]dx $$ As Tyler indicated, find this integral using the $u$-substitution of $u = 16 - 0.14 x$.


So, we want the function whose derivative is $\sqrt{16 - 0.14x}$. If we naively just integrated the outside function, we would get $\frac{2}{3} (16 - 0.14x)^{3/2}$. Let's check what the derivative of this function would be. We find, using the chain rule, $$ \frac d{dx} \frac{2}{3}(16 - 0.14x)^{3/2} = \sqrt{16 - 0.14 x} \cdot(-0.14) $$ This is almost what we want, except that we have a $-0.14$ multiplying at the end. So, we're going to take what we got originally and divide by $-0.14$. We then have $$ \frac d{dx} \frac{1}{-0.14}\frac{2}{3}(16 - 0.14x)^{3/2} = \frac{1}{-0.14}\sqrt{16 - 0.14 x} \cdot(-0.14) = \sqrt{16 - 0.14 x} $$ And that's the derivative we wanted! So, we now know that $$ \int \sqrt{16 - 0.14 x} = -\frac{1}{0.14}\frac{2}{3}(16 - 0.14x)^{3/2} + C $$ Use this to find the integral you need.

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