Question

Ms. Garcia gave each student in her class a scatterplot showing the relationship between average gas mileage in miles per gallon and weights of vehicles in pounds. She asked her students to construct a trend line for the scatterplot. Larry and Mary each constructed trend lines as shown below.

Answer 1

The points on a graph should be equally distributed above and below the line if that line correctly describe the data set. As we can see in the pictures, the majority of the points on the graph on the left are above the line, while on the right we can see data points above and below the line.

Therefore, the trend line on the right fits the data better.