2.172 The Happy Planet Index The website .com offers free short presentations, c
ID: 3252811 • Letter: 2
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2.172 The Happy Planet Index The website .com offers free short presentations, called TED Talks, on a variety of interesting subjects. One of the talks is called "The Happy Planet Index," by Nic Marks 61 Marks comments that we regularly measure and report economic data on countries, such as Gross National Product, when we really ought to be measuring the well-being of the people in the countries. He calls this measure Happiness, with larger numbers indicating greater happiness, health, and well-being. In addition, he believes we ought to be measuring the ecological footprint, per capita, of the country, with larger numbers indicating greater use of resources (such as gas and electricity) and more damage to the planet. Figure 2.57 shows a scatterplot of these two quantitative variables. The data are given in Hap- pyPlanetIndex. (a) Does there appear to be a mostly positive or mostly negative association between these two variables? What does that mean for these two variables? (b) Describe the happiness and ecological footprint of a country in the bottom left of the graph. (c) Costa Rica has the highest Happiness index. Find it on the graph and estimate its ecological footprint score. (d) For ecological footprints between 0 and 6, does a larger ecological footprint tend to be asso- ciated with more happiness? What about for ecological footprints between 6 and 10? Discuss this result in context. 60Millus, S., "Female infidelity may be inherited," Science News, July 16, 2011, p. 10. 61Marks, N., "The Happy Planet Index," www.TED.com/talks, August 29, 2010.Explanation / Answer
a.) From the scatterplot, it appears to be a positive association between the two variables.
A positive correlation means, an increase in one variable (independent) will lead to the increase in another variable (dependent) by a certain amount.
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