Question

Please help with this problem, I don't understand how to work it out.

Answer 1

The way to work it is to make a table in Excel (or equivalent program) with the data of budget for every year.

This is how it should look:

year      budget
     0     265.1
     1     277.5
     2     288.9
     3     303.0
     4     311.3
     5    320.4
     6    334.5
     7    351.2
     8    368.2
     9    381.7

Select both columns and inser a scatter plot graph (menu, insert, graph, scatterplot).

Now change the design of the graph to include the model. In this case I got y = 12.724 x + 262.92

x represents the number of year after 1990 and y represents the budget.

Now you can use the model to calcualte the budget when you know the year and to calculate the year when you know the budget.

For year 2001, x = 11 and y = 12.724 (11) + 262. 92 = 402.88 (which is 402,880)

 This is the same year for which the budget exceeds 400,000.