Solution

ID: past-exam-of-the-mathematics-course-of-the-university-of-cambridge/2009/iii/paper-102/4/a/solution

Use incident counts divided by that village-year's population exposure , and graph against calendar year. Show separate small panels or labelled lines for all villages; a population-weighted overall line answers a different question from an equally weighted average village rate. A plot of counts alone can mistake population change for a rate change.
For the two printed villages, the observed rates per thousand residents are approximately
The first trajectory increases throughout; the second falls initially and then rises sharply. The last-to-first rate ratios are and , respectively. The figure displays these two observed trajectories only. The other thirty village trajectories cannot be drawn from the PDF, because their observations were supplied in the separate emailed dataset.

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