Given a text T, and several options, according to the question posed in the text T to choose the most appropriate option from the options as the answer, please directly output the most appropriate option, do not need to output the explanation.

Anh Liu is an analyst researching whether a company's debt burden affects investors' decision to short the company's stock. She calculates the short interest ratio (the ratio of short interest to average daily share volume, expressed in days) for 50 companies as of the end of 2016 and compares this ratio with the companies' debt ratio (the ratio of total liabilities to total assets, expressed in decimal form).Liu provides a number of statistics in Exhibit 1. She also estimates a simple regression to investigate the effect of the debt ratio on a company's short interest ratio. The results of this simple regression, including the analysis of variance (ANOVA), are shown in Exhibit 2.In addition to estimating a regression equation, Liu graphs the 50 observations using a scatterplot, with the short interest ratio on the vertical axis and the debt ratio on the horizontal axis.
| Exhibit l.Summary Statistics | Debt Ratio | Short Interest Ratio |
| Statistic | X | Y |
| Sum | 19.8550 | 192.3000 |
| Average | 0.3971 | 3.8460 |
| Sum of squared deviations | >(X，-X)=2.2225 | E(x-r)=412.2042 |
| from the mean | 台 | 台 |
| Sum of cross-products of | >(X，-X)(Y，-Y)=-9.2430 |
| deviations from the mean |



| Exhibit 2.Regression of the Short Interest Ratio on the Debt Ratio |
| Degrees of | Sum of Squares(SS) |
| ANOVA | Freedom(df) | Mean Square(MS) |
| Regression | 1 | 38.4404 | 38.4404 |
| Residual | 48 | 373.7638 | 7.7867 |
| Total | 49 | 412.2042 |
| Regression Statistics |
| Mult pleR | 0.3054 |
| R | 0.0933 |
| Standard | error of | 2.7905 |
| est in ate |
| Observations | 50 |
| Coefficients | Standard Error | t-Statistic |
| Intercept | 5.4975 | 0.8416 | 6.5322 |
| Debt ratio | -4.1589 | 1.8718 | -2.2219 |


Liu is considering three interpretations of these results for her report on the relationship between debt ratios and short interest ratios:Interpretation 1: Companies' higher debt ratios cause lower short interest ratios.Interpretation 2: Companies' higher short interest ratios cause higher debt ratios.Interpretation 3: Companies with higher debt ratios tend to have lower short interest ratios.She is especially interested in using her estimation results to predict the short interest ratio for MQD Corporation, which has a debt ratio of 0.40.
The dependent variable in Liu's regression analysis is the:
Option A:intercept.
Option B:debt ratio.
Option C:short interest ratio.

Answer: C