3.16 ● ▼ The National Survey on Drug Use and Health, conducted in 2006 and 2007 by the Office of Applied Studies, led to the following state estimates of the total number of people ages 12 and older who had used a tobacco product within the last month.

State Number of People (in thousands)
Alabama 1,307 Alaska 161 Arizona 1,452 Arkansas 819 California 6,751 Colorado 1,171 Connecticut 766 Delaware 200 District of Columbia 141 Florida 4,392 Georgia 2,341 Hawaii 239 Idaho 305 Illinois 3,149 Indiana 1,740 Iowa 755 Kansas 726 Kentucky 1,294 Louisiana 1,138 Maine 347 Maryland 1,206 Massachusetts 1,427 Michigan 2,561 Minnesota 1,324 Mississippi 763 Missouri 1,627 State Number of People (in thousands)
Montana 246 Nebraska 429 Nevada 612 New Hampshire 301 New Jersey 1,870 New Mexico 452 New York 4,107 North Carolina 2,263 North Dakota 162 Ohio 3,256 Oklahoma 1,057 Oregon 857 Pennsylvania 3,170 Rhode Island 268 South Carolina 1,201 South Dakota 202 Tennessee 1,795 Texas 5,533 Utah 402 Vermont 158 Virginia 1,771 Washington 1,436 West Virginia 582 Wisconsin 1,504 Wyoming 157

a. Construct a stem-and-leaf display using thousands (of thousands) as the stems and truncating the leaves to the tens (of thousands) digit.

b. Write a few sentences describing the shape of the distribution and any unusual observations.

c. The four largest values were for California, Texas, Florida, and New York. Does this indicate that tobacco use is more of a problem in these states than elsewhere? Explain.

d. If you wanted to compare states on the basis of the extent of tobacco use, would you use the data in the given table? If yes, explain why this would be reasonable. If no, what would you use instead as the basis for the comparison?