When the price of butter was "low," consumers spent $5 billion annually on its consumption. When the price doubled, consumer expenditures increased to $7 billion. Recently you read that this means that the demand curve for butter is upward sloping (i. e., price and quantity demanded are directly related, as price increases, quantity demanded also increases). Do you agree? Explain.

The plastic flowerpots company has two manufacturing departments, molding and packaging. at the beginning of the month, the molding department has 2,100 units in inventory, 70% complete as to materials. during the month, the molding department started 18,500 units. at the end of the month, the molding department had 3,150 units in ending inventory, 80% complete as to materials. units completed in the molding department are transferred into the packaging department. cost information for the molding department for the month follows: beginning work in process inventory (direct materials) $ 1,300 direct materials added during the month 28,900 using the weighted-average method, compute the molding department's (a) equivalent units of production for materials and (b) cost per equivalent unit of production for materials for the month. (round "cost per equivalent unit of production" to 2 decimal places.)

Chang corp. has $375,000 of assets, and it uses only common equity capital (zero debt). its sales for the last year were $595,000, and its net income was $25,000. stockholders recently voted in a new management team that has promised to lower costs and get the return on equity up to 15.0%. what profit margin would the firm need in order to achieve the 15% roe, holding everything else constant? a. 9.45%b. 9.93%c. 10.42%d. 10.94%e. 11.49%

Activity-based costing (abc) is not truly a cost collection mechanism as much as it is an inventory valuation method. the main purpose for implementing an activity-based cost system is to try to overcome some of the cost distortions that occur in traditional costing from product differences when there are variations in size and complexity. however, one of the disadvantages of utilizing abc is that the additional information gathering necessary to implement costing with that level of detail might be beyond the reach of some companies with resource or financial constraints. with this in mind, what kinds of industries or companies do you think would benefit most from using activity-based costing and why? in designing or modifying an accounting system to capture appropriate costs for abc, what considerations do you think would need to be made?