Final answer:
A production possibilities curve (PPC) that reflects increasing opportunity costs is concave to the origin, with a bowed-out shape, illustrating the law of increasing opportunity cost, where resources are less adaptable over time. A straight-line PPC indicates constant opportunity costs, which is not a realistic scenario for most goods.
Step-by-step explanation:
A production possibilities curve (PPC) that reflects increasing opportunity costs will be concave to the origin, meaning it will have a bowed-out shape. This shape occurs because, according to the law of increasing opportunity cost, as the production of one good increases, the opportunity cost of producing additional units of this good will typically increase as well.
In other words, the more you focus on producing one good, the greater the cost of not producing the other good becomes. This happens as resources are not perfectly adaptable to the production of both goods and, over time, reallocating resources from the production of one good to another becomes increasingly costly in terms of forgone output of the first good.
The PPF (Production Possibilities Frontier) for healthcare and education, for example, is drawn as a curved line to show that as we dedicate more and more resources to one good (such as education), the opportunity cost in terms of reduced output of the other good (healthcare) grows larger. If a PPC is represented as a straight line, as in PPC A from the information provided, this would indicate constant opportunity costs for producing the two goods, which is not typically the case in most real-world scenarios.