Question

When an anthropologist finds skeletal remains, he needs to figure out the height of the person. The height of a person (in cm) and the length of one of his/her metacarpal bone (in cm) were collected and are in the table below. Create a scatter plot and state if there is a relationship between the height of a person and the length of his/her metacarpal.

Length of Metacarpal	Height of person
45	171
51	178
39	157
41	163
48	172
49	183
46	173
43	175
47	173

When I create the scatter plot in Excel, my horizontal axis starts at 0 but my vertical axis starts at 155 rather than 0 as well. Not sure what I'm doing wrong

Answer 1

Scatter plot is a type of graph in which we mark different points (x,y) corresponding to X and Y variable, it helps in identifying any correlation between the X and Y variables.

The following scatter plot is generated in EXCEL using the charts section in the Insert tab of EXCEL.

We can see from the scatter plot that there exists a positive correlation between the length of metacarpal and height of person i.e as the length of metacarpal increase the height of the person also increases. However, there is more change in height of person for a unit change in length of the metacarpal i.e slope of the trendline is greater than 1.