Back-to-school shopping is a very big business. Some may consider these expenses essential while others look at them as discretionary costs. However you look at it, the data of the average dollars spent per family with school-age children is very interesting. Examine the chart below with information from the National Retail Federation.

a. Without making a scatter plot, what trend do you see in the data?
b. Let 2004 be replaced by 1, 2005 by 2, 2006 by 3, and so on. You should now have the ordered pairs (1, 483.28), (2, 443.77), (3, 527.08), (4, 563.49), (5, 594.24), (6, 548.72), (7, 606.40), (8, 603.63), (9, 688.82), (10, 634.79), (11, 669.28), (12, 630.36). Draw a scatter plot. Describe the correlation.