ShmoopTube

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Here’s a question to put a little shmoop in your step…

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For the past few years, the owners of a local baseball team, the Fighting Pansies, have

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been trying to increase slumping attendance by lowering ticket prices.

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Twitter feedback indicates that the biggest barrier to ticket sales is the high cost of the ticket.

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No one wants to pay through the roof to watch a bunch of Pansies play baseball.

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If a scatter plot were used here, horizontal values on it could represent the ever-higher

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markdowns in ticket prices each year with respect to the original prices.

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On the other hand, vertical values could represent the percentage increase in average attendance

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per game starting from the beginning of the ticket price reductions.

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Based on the above description, which of the following would be the most accurate statement

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about the scatter plot representing this situation?

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And here are the potential answers...

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OK, so this long, hairy question is asking us to interpret a scatter plot… without providing us a scatter plot.

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In other words… if WE were in charge of converting the given information into a scatter

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plot… how on Earth would we do it?

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Well, the problem tells us we should show

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the discounted ticket prices along the horizontal, or x-axis…

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…and the vertical, or y-axis, should show the percentage of increase in attendance.

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If we were to put together such a plot, like this…

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...with attendance going up as discounts go up…

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…we’d have a POSITIVE correlation, since our plotted points move in an upward direction

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from left to right.

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Be careful here…

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…if we were to compare attendance with ticket PRICES, we’d have a negative correlation…

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…but because we’re asked to put the DISCOUNTS along the x-axis,

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we actually do wind up with a positive correlation.

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So our answer is A.

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As in, “All-star.”

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