Task 1 – Using data provided by your teacher, identify the answers to Natalie’s questions.
Natalie was born in March of 2001. What is the closest price to a dollar per gallon that the average fuel cost has been since she was born?
What general statements could be made about gas prices since 1992 based on the table?
In which months are gas prices generally higher? Choose 5 years to graph to prove your answer. What are possible reasons for this increase?
After the dinner conversation, Natalie began paying close attention to gas prices as she passed by gas stations. She noticed that some weeks, stores changed their prices several times, while other weeks the prices remained the same. Looking at the data confused her a bit, as it presents 1 price for each month. She asked her parents how this could be when she couldn’t recall a time when the price stayed the same the whole month. A) What do you think her parents’ response was? B) Where does the one number per month come from?
In March, 2001 the average price of a gallon of gas on the east coast was $1.387. List 3 possible actual daily prices for fuel during that month. Support your actual prices using reasoning about average.
Natalie filled the minivan’s gas tank with 23 gallons of gas. The price per gallon was $3.439. Before paying for the gas, she rounded the cost per gallon to the nearest hundredth and multiplied by the total number of gallons to find the total. However, the register was programmed to multiply the actual cost per gallon by the number of gallons before rounding to the nearest hundredth. How does the price Natalie expected to pay compare to the actual price she paid? Explain why this happens, when both Natalie and the register rounded.
Task 2 Identify 3 patterns, drastic changes (How much defines a drastic change?), and outliers (data that lies outside of the norm) in the data? Draw conclusions regarding possible causes.
Gas Prices Assignment ~ The website with the gas price chart is HERE