Question: Does anyone else find this cartoon as funny as I do?
Instead of another round of linear equations, lets lighten things up and talk about manatees...
Question: Do Florida boat registrations kill manatees?
Example: The table below lists the number of Florida boat registrations and manatee deaths from 1977 to 2009.
Example: Below is a scatterplot of manatee deaths versus the number of boat registrations in Florida. Each point represents a particular year.
We are now going to model this data with a straight line....
Below is the manatee death versus boat registration data with a line which models the overall trend.
Te equation for this "line-of-best-fit" for the manatee data is $\hat{y}=0.129x-43.172$.
Thus, if we know in advance the number of boat registrations for the year, we can roughly predict how many manatee deaths will occur in that year.
Pop-Quiz: If we know 60 manatees were killed by boats, estimate how many boat registrations there were that year.