Picturing a Relationship with a Scatterplot

An article in Garden Gate magazine caught my eye: “Count Cricket Chirps to Gauge Temperature.” According to the article, all you have to do is find a cricket, count the number of times it chirps in 15 seconds, add 40, and voilà! You've just estimated the temperature in Fahrenheit.

The National Weather Service Forecast Office even puts out its own “Cricket Chirp Converter.” You enter the number of cricket chirps recorded in 15 seconds, and the converter gives you the estimated temperature in four different units, including Fahrenheit and Celsius.

A fair amount of research does support the claim that frequency of cricket chirps is related to temperature. For the purpose of illustration I've taken only a subset of some of the data (see Table 18-1).