Prepaid cards can be loaded with cash and used anywhere credit cards or debit cards are accepted. The total amounts of money loaded onto U.S. prepaid cards are shown in Table 61 for various years.

Let p be the total amount of money (in billions of dollars) loaded onto prepaid cards at t years since 2005.
a. Identify the explanatory and response variables.
b. Construct a scatterplot by hand.
c. Is the association positive or negative? What does that mean in this situation?
d. Graph the model p = 12.6t - 20.13 by hand on the scatterplot. Does the line come close to the data points?
e. Estimate the total amount of money that was loaded onto prepaid cards in 2014. Did you perform interpolation or extrapolation? Mercator Advisory Group, a company that analyzes the payments industry, predicted the amount would be $98.6 billion (Source: Mercator Advisory Group). Compare your result with the company€™s predicted amount.

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Table 61 Total Amounts of Money Loaded onto Prepaid Cards Total Amount of Money billions of dollars) 20 29 41 57 64 84 Years 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013