Mike Johnson is reviewing transportation costs incurred by his Chicago sales team. When salespeople make sales calls, they  typically use taxis, and Mike wants to develop a way to estimate what those fares should be. Mike has  obtained taxi fare data from the Chicago Data Portal and is asking you to develop a model he can use to  predict fares for his team.

The Excel data file for answering this problem can be found in WileyPLUS.

Required

a. Prepare a visualization of the data set using the CHART tool in Excel to create an XY scattergraph  chart. Prepare one chart with trip length in seconds and fare and one chart with trip miles and fare.  Comment on what the visualization reveals.

b. Use the SLOPE and INTERCEPT functions in Excel to develop a cost estimation equation based on  trip miles. Round your answers to two decimal places.

c. Use the SLOPE and INTERCEPT functions in Excel to develop a cost estimation equation based on  trip time (in seconds). Round your answers to two decimal places.

d. Using these two estimation equations, what is the expected taxi fare for a trip of 2.5 miles taking 850  seconds? Round your answer to two decimal places.

e. Some of the data points appear to be missing values—a fare of $0, distance traveled of 0 miles and/  or travel time of 0 seconds. Remove these data points from the data set and repeat parts b, c, and d.

f. In reality, taxi fares are based on both time and distance traveled. How would you revise your estimation equations to incorporate this reality?