Annual consumption of bottled water in the United States is given in the table.
Let C(t) be the billions of gallons consumed t years since 1990.
Year Bottled water consumption (billions of gallons)
1990 2.2
1992 2.4
1994 3.0
1996 3.5
1998 4.1
2000 4.9
2002 6.0
2003 6.4
Find best fit model C(t) =
In year 2014, what will be the bottled water consumption?
"Annual consumption of bottled water in the United States is given in the table ... etc"
The following should help. Note that I've used a slightly different notation, and I've not shown how I obtained the best-fit values):
(I should add that extrapolating an empirical fit this far from the experimental data is a silly thing to do in general!!)