The article “California State Parks Closure List Due Soon” (The Sacramento Bee, August 30, 2009)

gave the following data on x 5 number of visitors in fiscal year 2007–2008 and y 5 percentage of operating costs covered by park revenues for the 20 state park districts in California:

Number of Visitors Percentage of Operating Costs Covered by Park Revenues 2,755,849 37 1,124,102 19 1,802,972 32 Percentage of Operating Costs Covered by Park Revenues 1,757,386 80 1,424,375 17 1,524,503 34 1,943,208 36 819,819 32 1,292,942 38 3,170,290 40 3,984,129 53 1,575,668 31 1,383,898 35 14,519,240 108 3,983,963 34 14,598,446 97 4,551,144 62 10,842,868 36 1,351,210 36 603,938 34

a. Use a statistical software package or a graphing calculator to construct a scatterplot of the data. Describe any interesting features of the scatterplot.

b. Find the equation of the least-squares regression line (use software or a graphing calculator).

c. Is the slope of the least-squares line positive or negative? Is this consistent with your description in Part (a)?

d. Based on the scatterplot, do you think that the correlation coefficient for this data set would be less than 0.5 or greater than 0.5? Explain.