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Background: This year (2014), Russia is hosting the Winter Olympics. Some commentators have noted that the country that hosts the Olympics gets a ‘bump’ in the number of medals, compared to how well they usually do. You can think of it as the home court advantage – maybe the host country gives athletes better support or training, or maybe the athletes are really working hard for their country while the world is watching.
The graph shows the number of medals that countries have won when they did not host the winter Olympics (gray color) and when they did host the winter Olympics (in black).
Data Source:
Questions:
1. Describe what the graph shows about how the number of medals won compares between years in which a country hosts and years in which they did not host the winter Olympics.
2. Does Russia have the home court advantage? Based on the graph, do you think Russia will win more medals that it has in the past? If we said that Russia would normally get 20 medals (based on the average of their usual performance), how many do you guess they would get this year while hosting?
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