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Why does chicken produce many eggs?
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Chickens produce clutches of eggs, usually between 3 to 6 at a time. Like many species that lay eggs including snakes and fish, they lay multiples of eggs. One reason for this is that egg laying species often devote less time to caring for their progeny than creatures that have live births. The reason for larger numbers of eggs is basically a survival strategy, the more you have the greater the chance of one or more surviving.
There is also the fact that eggs contain their own source of food for development, in the case of the chicken it is the yolk (yellow bit) that provides for the developing chick. This enables the hen to quickly recover and breed again, laying eggs is a survival response to a pressure to provide numbers. A healthy hen can produce viable eggs (hatching eggs) up to 14 times in a single year.