The table displays data on the top fifteen crude oil-producing nations

Official Explanation

Statement 3

Here you have to compare the ratio of “Daily Production” to “Proven Reserves” for the United States to that ratio for each of the other countries. For the United States, this ratio is:

\(\frac{8.85 million}{19.2 billion} = \frac{8.85*10^6}{19.2*10^9} = 0.46*10^{-3}\)

You do not need to actually calculate this ratio precisely for each of the other countries. While on many Integrated Reasoning questions you have to be precise and should not estimate, here is one case when it is safe to estimate. Why? Because the question does not ask you to provide an exact value, but rather to compare certain values to certain other values.

All countries produced barrels in the millions daily and had reserves in the billions. Thus, the ratio for all countries will look like the ratio for the United States: it will be in the form of \(R × 10^{–3}\). For the purposes of the comparison, you can ignore the \(10^{–3}\) and estimate the various values of R.

For the United States, R equals almost 0.5. A quick look at the table shows you that for most countries R is considerably smaller than 0.5 (e.g., for Saudi Arabia it is \(\frac{10.3}{259.9}\) or approximately 0.04; and for Canada, it is \(\frac{3.7}{175.2}\) or approximately 0.02). Scan through the table and look for a country whose Daily Production (ignoring the unit—millions of barrels) is close to half its Proven Reserves (again ignoring the unit). The only country that comes close is Norway, and even then the ratio is closer to one-third rather than one-half (\((\frac{2.14}{6.7})\) ). Thus, no country produces more crude oil daily relative to the amount of its own proven reserves than does the United States.

The correct answer is Yes.