Ellington Corporation uses least-squares regression to analyze a variety of operating costs. A staff assistant determined that monthly machine hours (MH) have a strong cause-and-effect relationship with total maintenance costs, and generated the following statistics: Intercept: $170,000 b coefficient: $3.80 Total machine hours for the year: 36,500

Required: A. Construct the company's regression equation. B. Based on your answer in part "A," identify Ellington's dependent variable and independent variable. C. What does the b coefficient really represent? D. Predict the company's maintenance cost in a month when 3,200 machine hours are worked.