Tasha finally bought a new car. She uses it mainly to drive to work, which involves a lot of driving on gravel roads. She was concerned about damage to her windshield from flying stones. In a journal, she kept track of how many scratches she could see. Tasha plotted the number of weeks she owned her car on the x-axis and the number of scratches on the y-axis.
If she were to create a scatterplot of her data, the direction of the association would be (A) __________. The strength of the association would be (B) __________.
Since we don't have data that Tara has, perhaps a few thoughts will help direct us to the right answer:
1. Does the number of scratches always increase with time? Can it possibly decrease (without changing the windshield)?
2. Assuming the climatic conditions remain more or less constant, i.e. all data are recorded in the same season without snow, would the average number of new scratches per day (or per week) be reasonably constant?
If you have the scatterplot, you're welcome to post a link to the plot.