Return homemaths through spreadsheets

Handling data: H1 The women's mile?

The spreadsheet shows you the women's world mile records from 1954 until recently. Is there a pattern to these results?

By changing the values of m and c you can try to find a predictor function y = mx+c, where x represents the year and y the record time, which accurately predicts the record. Try to get the values of y to match as closely as possible to the true record times.

(a) What would you predict the record to be this year?
(b) According to your predictor function, what will the record be 100 years from now? Does this make sense?