Estimation question

How much money is spent in the USA per year on gas?

Practice this question out loud. An AI interviewer asks it, follows up like a real interviewer would, and scores your answer. Type or speak.

What this question tests

Quantitative estimation skill: breaking an unfamiliar number into a defensible chain of assumptions and sanity checking the result.

Clarify whether gas means gasoline for vehicles or utility gas, and state you will estimate gasoline spend.
Estimate the US population and the share who drive, roughly 330 million people and about 230 million licensed drivers.
Estimate average miles driven per driver per year, around 13,000 miles, and average fuel efficiency, about 25 mpg.
Compute annual gallons per driver, then multiply by driver count to get total gallons.
Multiply total gallons by an assumed average price per gallon, around $3.50, to get total spend.
Sanity check the result against known US fuel industry scale.

States assumptions explicitly and rounds to clean numbers, for example 230 million drivers, 13,000 miles a year, 25 mpg gives about 520 gallons per driver a year.
Computes total gallons as roughly 120 billion, times $3.50 gives about $420 billion a year, then compares this to real reported figures near 130 to 140 billion gallons.
Explains which input, efficiency or price, would move the estimate the most.

Chapters of the AI PM course that teach what this question tests.