Question: Tile Emporium wants a way to forecast floor tile sales. The owner believes that the sales are directly related to the number of new homes being built in town. The owner has gathered data from county records on monthly house construction permits and from store records on monthly sales. The data is in the following table:

a) Develop a linear regression model for this data and forecast tile sales if 140 construction permits for new homes are filed.

b) Determine the strength of the casual relationship between monthly sales and new home construction by using correlation.

c) Compute the coefficient of determination for the data and explain its meaning.