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Background: Did you ever wonder if big events – like the Super Bowl – affect how much power people use? For example, does everyone all across the country really get up and go open the refrigerator at halftime? A Princeton University power plant manager wondered the same thing – and he graphed electricity usage data from the 2006 Super Bowl from both Princeton University and the area surrounding Princeton (which is in New Jersey).
The graph below shows how much electricity was used for both the area around Princeton (pink line) and the Princeton University campus (blue line). There are two Y-axes because Princeton uses much less electricity than the multi-state region around it, so the electricity use is on different scales, in different units.
Data Source: Princeton Alumni Weekly blog, Brett Tomlinson, January 30, 2008. Available:
Questions:
1. Describe the story the graph tells about how power use changes during the course of the Super Bowl, both for Princeton and for the surrounding region.
2. Are the patterns the same? What are Princeton students doing the same or differently from people in the area?
