A company is selling toothpicks. It costs $0.01 to produce each toothpick and a fixed cost of $60 a month for the company. If the company is selling toothpicks for $0.02 each, how many toothpicks must they sell a month in order to break-even?

6,000 toothpicks

Step-by-step explanation:

In this question, we are trying to evaluate the number of toothpicks a company must sell to ensure that the money spent on production is exactly equal to revenue from sales.

What we do is this!

Let’s assign a variable to represent the number of tooth picks sold and produced by the company. Let us call this number x.

First, we evaluate the total amount spent on production of x toothpicks. From the question, we can see that the cost of producing a single toothpick is $0.01, hence, to produce x toothpicks, amount spent asides the fixed cost is $0.01 * x = $0.01x

Now, the total cost on production which includes the fixed cost of the company would be $(0.01x + 60). This is the total amount spent to produce the goods.

Now revenue from sales for x toothpicks at $0.02 each is $0.02x

Since we are looking to Breakeven, we equate the costs to the revenue.

0.01x + 60 = 0.02x

0.02x-0.01x = 60

0.01x = 60

x = 60/0.01 = 6,000 toothpicks