The following table gives the completion times for the winners in the women's
200 -meter dash finals in the Summer Olympic Games from 1972 to 2008 . The
times are in seconds rounded to the nearest \(1 / 100\) second.
$$
\begin{array}{cc}
\hline \text { Olympic Year } & \text { Time (seconds) } \\
\hline 1972 & 22.40 \\
1976 & 22.37 \\
1980 & 22.03 \\
1984 & 21.81 \\
1988 & 21.34 \\
1992 & 21.81 \\
1996 & 22.12 \\
2000 & 21.85 \\
2004 & 22.05 \\
2008 & 21.74 \\
\hline
\end{array}
$$
a. Assign a value of 0 to 1972,1 to 1976,2 to 1980 , and so on. Call this new
variable Year. Make a new table with the variables Year and Time.
b. With year as an independent variable and time as the dependent variable,
compute \(S S_{x x}, S S_{y y}\) and \(S S_{x x}\)
construct a scatter diagram for these data. Does the scatter diagram exhibit a
linear negative relationship between year and time?
d. Find the least squares regression line \(\hat{y}=a+b x\).
e. Give a brief interpretation of the values of \(a\) and \(b\) calculated in part
\(\mathrm{d}\).
f. Compute the correlation coefficient \(r\).
g. Predict the time for the year 2016 . Comment on this prediction.