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If I had to answer the question for an interview here is what I'd do. I live in a town with 30,000 people and there are roughly 15 stations. There are 300,000,000 people so there are probably 150,000 gas stations.
According to the 2002 census the answer is 117,100.
http://www.infoplease.com/askeds/number-gas-stations-us-1995.html
I had this question in an interview, and the question is really testing your thought process and to see how you think logically. No one expects you to actually know how many gas stations there are. If you answer "according to the 2002 census, there are 117,000," they will ask how you would come to that answer yourself. The vault guides have many strategies on how to answer these questions.
Fucking strategic consulting. NO I don't care how many golf balls are in a 747 BCG.
i think its close to 144,000 - saw something on cnbc about 2 months ago.
but basically they want to see how you think like gqbanker said
Is this a brain teaser question for an interview or something?
yes
anyone who would like to share the thought process of this question?
Think of your town, or a relatively small town like sucram said. Make a guesstimate on how many gas stations there are in this town, and then extrapolate to the size of the US (300 million ppl).
$0.02...
Start w/ a population of 300M. Assume 2/3 that many vehicles - 200M. On average, ea. vehicle is prob. filled every 2 weeks ~ 25 times a year. So 200M*25 cars are filled ea. year = 5000M fillings. Assume ea. gas station can handle 100 cars a day on average (pick a number, any number) ~ 36000 filling a year.
5000M / 36K = 138K gas stations ~ 140K gas stations.
Disclaimer - I'm not in MC/IB and have never had to answer this during an interview.
had a similar question throw to me by my professor, how many homes are there in singapore. roughly estimated average family size to be 4, in a 4 million population. so gave the answer as 1 million, which was pretty close to the actual.
guess he is prep-ing us. now i know.
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