Gallup Poll. The Gallup organization periodically asks the following question:

If your party nominated a generally well-qualified person for president who happened to be a woman, would you vote for that person?

Here is a time series plot of the percentage answering

“yes” versus the year of the (20th) century. The least squares trend line is given by: yn t = 5.58 + 0.999Year, where Year = 37, 45, c99 to represent the years during which the survey was given.

a) The R2 for this trend line is 94%. A student decided to use this linear model to obtain a forecast for the percent who would respond “yes” in 2012. What value should the student use for Year?

b) Find the predicted value for the year 2012. Is it realistic?