2. Declining Number of Forms in the United States Today US. farm acreage is about the same as it was in the early part of the twentieth century, but the number of farms has shrunk. millions 1930 Looking at the table above, we note that the data could be modeled with a cubic or a quartic function. (a) Model the data with both cubic and quartic functions. Let the first coordinate of each data point be the number of years after 1900. That is, enter the data as (10, 6.4), (20, 6.5), and so on. Then using R2 , the coefficient of determination, decide which functions is the better fit. The R2 -Value gives an indication of how well the function fits the data. The closer R2 is to 1, the better the fit. (b) Graph the function with the scatterplot of the data. (c) Use the answer to part (a) to estimate the number of farms in 1900, 1975, and 2003