In a perfectly competitive market, prices and production costs are kept ?

Varied.

Explanation:

Market is a place whereby buyers and sellers meet, in which sellers provides goods and services to the buyers in exchange for money. There are some markets in which there are few sellers of a particular goods and services(or many sellers with different goods and services and the kind of market is known as monopolistic competitive market) and there are also some markets in which we have numerous buyers and sellers.

When there are many or numerous buyers and sellers in a market we say that the market is a PERFECTLY COMPETITIVE MARKET.

The other characteristics apart from the numbers of buyers and sellers of perfectly competitive market is that "prices and production costs are kept" varied because there is no access to price control.

after the civil war, and with the termination of slavery, the south was faced with a big problem; what was supposed to happen and how they were supposed to deal with the freedom and the rights that black people and freed slaves had gained as a result of the north defeating the south and forcing the end of slavery. first, most, if not all, of the workforce of the south came from slaves and they did not have an option to replace the loss of said workforce. second, particularly in the south, people were convinced that black people were lesser, less intelligent, less capable and less smart than whites. this posed a huge problem for them. also, southerners were faced with another issue; freed slaves now had a say in how their lives would be lived and the right to politically choose the way they would be governed. people in the south did not want to accept this, none of this and this opposition and the conflicts that arose from it, not to mention the afereffects of the war, forced the congress of the time to enact and enforce the reconstruction plans that had been proposed by president andrew johnson.