Janis Brown is the new director of parks for the state. She has been concerned about the amount of money being budgeted for promoting usage of the park system. Her total budget has been cut, and she wants to revise the promotional budget downward but is fearful that usage may drop so much that the park system will no longer be fulfilling the governor's objective of having at least 18 million people per year use the state's park. Before her arrival as director of parks, the department had developed the following linear relationship showing how use (U) was related to promotional expenditures.

This function was estimated based on the following set of 14 observations, where usage (U) is in millions of park visitors and promotional expenditures (PE) are in thousands of dollars (See Table):

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Year Usage Promotional E Year Usage Promotional E

1981 6 320 1988 16 1,320

1982 14 400 1989 17 1,410

1983 12 500 1990 17 1,700

1984 10 590 1991 19 2,010

1985 14 700 1992 17 2,190

1986 14 900 1993 18 2,400

1987 17 1,100 1994 19 2,720

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a. Using the linear regression, estimate the number of park visitors Janis could expect if she cut the budget to $1,500.00

Number of visitors = usage=________________________________________

Will this satisfy the governor's objective?

b. Plot the usage and promotional expenditures data on a graph.