Question

The developer of a new plant fertilizer gathered data about the quantity of fertilizer applied to a lemon tree and the number of lemons it produced. He used a graphing tool to organize the data in a scatter plot and find the line of best fit.

He found that the relationship between grams of fertilizer, x, and the number of lemons, y, is modeled by the equation y = 0.316x + 12.214, and the correlation coefficient for the data is 0.948.

Could this line of best fit be used to make reliable predictions?

Answer 1

Yes

Explanation:

Our correlation coefficient of r=0.948 is very close to 1, indicating a strong positive correlation between the number of grams of fertilizer and the number of lemons.

Therefore, this line of best fit can make reliable predictions, although not guarantee what will actually happen.