Explore the given distribution of the numbers of beds in short-term general hospitals in selected U.S. metropolitan areas by producing a boxplot (refer to the data in the file P2_17.XLS). In particular, use your computer-generated boxplot to answer the following questions:

a. Is it more likely for these metropolitan areas to have larger or smaller numbers of hospital beds?

b. Is the mean or median the more accurate measure of central location in this case? Explain.

c. Characterize the variation of these values around the center of the data.

d. Do you detect the presence of any extreme outliers in this case?