OK, I'll take a crack at it:
Scenario #1):
- The drug is an appetite-suppressant.
- Various different-sized doses are given daily to a great
number of laboratory hamsters.
- Each hamster is weighed once a week, and the average weight of
all the hamsters
getting the same dose is plotted against the amount of the
dose.
- The graph shows that the more appetite-suppressant medication
the animals get,
the lower their weight averages, ... but only up to a point.
More drug than that,
and they won't completely stop eating and die, but they'll
stabilize at a relatively
constant weight regardless of the dose.
Scenario #2):
- This is a graph you get from the hamster vet, along with a
drug that he wants you
to give your 75 pet hamsters.
- You'll be responsible for figuring out how much to give each
one. Here's how you'll
do it:
..... You'll weigh each hamster every morning and every night
for a week, and keep
the results in a big notebook.
..... At the end of a week, for each individual hamster, you'll
calculate the average
of all 14 times that you weighed that one.
..... For each hamster, you'll look up his average weight on the
graph, and the
line will show you how much of the drug to start giving that one
daily.