PROCESS OF ELIMINATION (POE)

Following illustration will show how POE will improve your changes of guessing the right answer.

Q. The following SAS program is submitted.

DATA one;

 ARRAY g[4,3] (1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12);

RUN;

What is the value of element g (3, 2)?

A.     8

B.     10

C.     1

D.     12

Now, just by looking at the data we know that element g (3, 2) should be somewhere in the middle of the array definition. Lets now look at the answer choices, A can be the answer as it is somewhere in the middle and so can choice B. But when you look at choice C and D, and you know g (3, 2) cannot be extreme left or right values, so now you can remove these obviously two wrong choices. Now you are left with choice A and B, now you can make an educated guess and choose either A or B as your answer.

Sometime adding new line or spaces in your question can make finding answer easy. In our above example suppose the array was declared as

ARRAY g [4, 3] (1, 2, 3,

                4, 5, 6,

                7, 8, 9,

               10, 11, 12);

It is intuitive to understand here that there are 4 rows and 3 columns and question is asking for element in 3^rd row and 2^nd column which is 8.