Data on x poverty rate (%) and y high school dropout rate (%) for the 50 U.S. states and the District of Columbia were used to construct the following scatterplot (Chronicle of Higher Education, August 31, 2001):

Write a few sentences commenting on this scatterplot.
Would you describe the relationship between poverty rate and dropout rate as positive (y tends to increase as x increases), negative (y tends to decrease as x increases), or as having no discernible relationship between x and y?