The National Interagency Fire Center (www.nifc.gov) reports statistics about wildfires. Here’s an analysis of the number of wildfires between 1985 and 2012.

Dependent variable is Fires
R-squared = 0.032%
s = 11690
Variable Coefficient
Intercept …………………. 75609.0
Years since 1985 ………… 78.5
a) Is a linear model appropriate for these data? Explain.
b) Interpret the slope in this context.
c) Can we interpret the intercept? Why or why not?
d) What does the value of se say about the size of the residuals? What does it say about the effectiveness of the model?
e) What does R2 mean in this context?