Question

Describe a situation you’re familiar with where one thing changes in correlation with another, similar to how function values change with variations in the independent variable. State whether that situation is close to being linear, exponential, or neither in its pattern of change. Explain your reasons for choosing this classification.

Answer 1

A very simple and good example for understanding the concept of correlation is to consider a situation where an employee works on the basis of hourly wages. Now if he works more hours per day, he is going to get more salary according to the wages per hour. So if number of hours he works increases, his wages would also increase which will be a positive correlation.

To understand, you can suppose that there are 4 men who have to paint a big house in 10 days. Now, if labor is increased to 6, the number of days they will take to paint the house will decrease. So there will be a negative correlation between the number of employees and the number of days to paint. I think it will be non linear since the amount of change in one variable should have a constant ratio to the amount of change in the other variable.

Answer 2

Consider a shop that only sells one product: rice. For each kilogram of rice sold, a certain amount of revenue is received. Therefore, the relationship between the weight of rice sold and the amount of revenue received, is going to be a linear relationship. For example, if a kilogram of rice costs $1, then 10 kg costs $10, 100 kg costs $100, and so on. This proportion is maintained for all numbers, thus making it a linear relationship.