Macmillan Learning
Barium-137m is a radioactive form of the element barium that decays very rapidly. It is easy and safe to use for lab experiments
in schools and colleges. In a typical experiment, the radioactivity of a sample of barium-137m is measured for one minute. It is
then measured for three additional one-minute periods, separated by two minutes. Thus, data are recorded at one, three, five, and
seven minutes after the start of the first counting period. The measurement units are counts. Here are the data for one of
these experiments:
Time
Count
r=
1
578
I
3
317
5
203
Click to download the data in your preferred format.
CSV Excel JMP Mac-Text Minitab PC-Text R SPSS TI Crunchlt!
Make a scatterplot of these data.
Find the correlation r between count and time.
(Use decimal notation. Give your answer to three decimal places.)
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