Exercises

This set of exercises allows you to practice the data analysis skills of this lesson in the context of further real-world data sets.

Teachers may wish to use these exercises for assignments, classroom activities, or discussion.

For each of the data sets below, try to answer the following questions as accurately as possible. Give appropriate evidence to support your answers.

• Which part of the data do you choose to model/analyze? Why?
  
  
• Describe in English the "larger rule" of which the data is only a sampling.
  
  
• Plot the data and describe in English what you see as the overall trend. Which family of functions might provide a good model for this type of trend?
  
  
• Find a particular member of the family you chose above by adjusting the parametrs to fit the data.
  
  
• Is your functional model a good fit? How have you measured this?
  
  
• Do you believe the trend that you have modeled extends beyond/between the data? Why?
  
  
• What would be some interesting values to interpolate or extrapolate from the data using your model? Why? See if you can approximate these values.
  
  
• Would you care to propose a natural law that might govern the real-world phenomenon from which the data was collected?

1. World Population Data

2. Educational Data

3. Data on Countries of the World

4. Computer Processor Speed Data

5. Airline On-Time Flight Data

6. Mortality Data

7. U.S. Prison Data

8. Voter Registration Data

9. Data on the Growth of the Internet

10. Endangered Species Data

11. U.S. Compact Disc Sales Data