### This Bitter Earth

(based on exercise 10 on p. 56 of the book)

To begin, load in the Boston data set. The Boston data set is part of the MASS library in R.

library(MASS)

Now the data set is contained in the object Boston. Read about the data set.

?Boston
1. How many rows are in this data set? How many columns? What do the rows and columns represent?

2. Make some (2-3) pairwise scatterplots of the predictors (columns) in this data set. Describe your findings.

3. Are any of the predictors associated with per capita crime rate? If so, explain the relationship.

4. Are there any suburbs of Boston that appear to have particularly high crime rates? Tax rate? Pupil-teacher ratios? Comment on the range of each predictor.

5. How many of the suburbs in this data set bound the Charles river?

6. What is the median pupil-teacher ratio among the towns in this data set?

7. If you want to build a model to predict the average value of a home based on the other variables, what is your output/response? What is your input?