David Savageau and Geoffrey Loftus, the authors of Places Rated Almanac (published in 2000 by Macmillan), have ranked 325 metropolitan areas in the United States with consideration of the following aspects of life in each area: cost of living, transportation, jobs, education, climate, crime, arts, health, and recreation.

The data are in the file P16_17.xlsx. The last column lists the city’s overall score, which is the average of the other scores. (You can check this with Excel’s AVERAGE function.)

a. Use multiple regression analysis to explore the relationship between the metropolitan area’s overall score and the set of potential explanatory variables.

b. Does the given set of explanatory variables do a good job of explaining variation in the overall score? Explain why or why not.