Answer:
Explanation:
My graphing calculator can solve this problem two ways. It can do a least-squares fit of the exponential data, or it can do a least-squares fit of the logarithm of the data. The answers come out different.
In "log mode", the parameters of the exponential equation are computed as ...
a ≈ 615.272
b ≈ 1.61875
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With log mode turned off, the "a" parameter is lower (≈553.071), and the "b" parameter is higher (≈1.65573). This mode gives a better fit to the larger data values, at the expense of a poorer fit to the lower data values, as you might expect.