Which of the following statements best interprets: Offers = 1.81 + 1.42Steps.?

Question

A university is offering a special job education program for students. The program is in 3 steps. Finishing each step requires 3 hours of lecture. The university has to decide whether it is going to promote this program. Five students who graduated last year were selected randomly and interviewed to provide the following data:

StudentSteps Finished (x)Job Offers (y)
11 4
22 6
31 3
40 1
53 5

To see the effectiveness of the job education program, the university conducted a simple least squares analysis with these data which yielded:

Offers = 1.81 + 1.42Steps.

Which of the following statements best interprets this result?
- On average, the students who join the program are expected to have 1.42 more job offers than the non-participants regardless of the steps they finished.
- On average, the students who join the program are expected to have 1.81 job offers.

- The students who finished the final step of the program are expected to have 1.42 more job offers than the average.
- The students who finished the final step of the program are expected to have 1.42 more job offers than those who finished only two steps.
- The students who join the program are expected to have 3.23 more job offers than the non-participants.

Answer 1

Your table got reformatted, but I read it to mean:
Student 1, 1 step, 4 offers
Student 2, 2 steps, 6 offers
Student 3, 1 step, 3 offers
Student 4, 0 steps, 1 offer
Student 5, 3 steps, 5 offers

Relating offers to steps with a linear approximation, we come up with the formula:
Offers = 1.81 + 1.42 x Steps

If you plug in the values of steps (0, 1, 2, 3) you get:

0 steps = 1.81 offers
1 step = 3.23 offers
2 steps = 4.65 offers
3 steps = 6.07 offers

Of your statements:
A) On average, the students who join the program are expected to have 1.42 more job offers than the non-participants regardless of the steps they finished.
FALSE - This would true of the people that took 1 step, but the people who took 2 and 3 steps averaged even more offers

B) On average, the students who join the program are expected to have 1.81 job offers.
FALSE - 1.81 is the minimum number of offers that everyone averages regardless of the number of steps taken.

C) The students who finished the final step of the program are expected to have 1.42 more job offers than the average.
FALSE - They have 1.42 more job offers than people that only took 2 steps, but not the average

D) The students who finished the final step of the program are expected to have 1.42 more job offers than those who finished only two steps.
TRUE - From the formula, we expect them to have 1.42 more job offers than those that finished two steps.

E) The students who join the program are expected to have 3.23 more job offers than the non-participants.
FALSE - Nope, non-participants have 1.81 offers. There is nothing we can conclude about the average offers of those that took 1 or more steps.

So the best answer is D:

"The students who finished the final step of the program are expected to have 1.42 more job offers than those who finished only two steps."

Answer 2

I'm going to say "D"... if you finish step 3, you should have 1.42 more job offers than a student who only finishes step 2.
I just don't see how a student completed 53 steps, if the first column is steps, or 6 steps if the second column is.