BASE SAS CERTIFICATION QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS

1. The SAS data set EMPLOYEE_INFO is listed below:

IDNumber Expenses

2542 100.00

3612 133.15

2198 234.34

2198 111.12

The following SAS program is submitted:

proc sort data = employee_info;

run;

Which one of the following BY statements completes the program and sorts the data sequentially by ascending expense values within each ascending IDNUMBER value?

A. by Expenses IDNumber;

B. by IDNumber Expenses;

C. by ascending (IDNumber Expenses);

D. by ascending IDNumber ascending Expenses;

Ans : B. By default SAS will sort data in ascending order. IDNumber should be specified before Expenses as we want IDNUMBER to be sorted in ascending.

2. Which one of the following is true of the SUM statement in a SAS DATA step program?

A. It is only valid in conjunction with a SUM function.

B. It is not valid with the SET, MERGE and UPDATE statements.

C. It adds the value of an expression to an accumulator variable and ignores missing values.

D. It does not retain the accumulator variable value from one iteration of the SAS DATA step to the next.

Ans : C

3. Which of the following is a valid statement about the VALUE range in the PROC FORMAT procedure? It cannot be...

A. A single character or numeric value

B. A range of character values

C. A list of unique values separated by commas

D. A combination of character and numeric values

Ans : D

4. The following SAS program is submitted:

data work.one;

x = 3;

y = 2;

z = x ** y;

run;

Which one of the following is the value of the variable Z in the output data set?

A. 6

B. 9

C. . (missing numeric value)

D. The program fails to execute due to errors.

Ans : B

** = exponentiation

X**Y raise X to the power of Y

So 3 to the power of 2 = 9

5. Which of the following is not an error identified during the compilation phase?

A) Quotation marks are unbalances

B) No RUN statement in the step

C) An option is invalid

D) Semicolons are missing in statements

Ans :  B

6. Which one of the following SAS statements renames two variables?

A. set work.dept1 work.dept2(rename = (jcode = jobcode) (sal = salary));

B. set work.dept1 work.dept2(rename = (jcode = jobcode sal = salary));

C. set work.dept1 work.dept2(rename = jcode = jobcode sal = salary);

D. set work.dept1 work.dept2(rename = (jcode jobcode) (sal salary));

Ans : B.  The syntax for RENAME is as follows :

RENAME=(old-name-1=new-name-1 old-name-2=new-name-2. . . old-name-n=new-name-n)

7. How many of the following variable names will not produce errors in an assignment statement?

variable

var

1variable

var1

#var

_variable#

A. 0

B. 1

C. 3

D. 6

Ans : C ; variable var var1. A variable cannot start with numeric or special characters except _. You also cannot use special characters anywhere in the name either though numeric values are allowed.

8. The following SAS program is submitted:

data test;

set sasuser.employees;

if 2 le years_service le 10 then

amount = 1000;

else if years_service gt 10 then

amount = 2000;

else

amount = 0;

amount_per_year = years_service / amount;

run;

Which one of the following values does the variable AMOUNT_PER_YEAR contain if an employee has been with the company for one year?

A. 0

B. 1000

C. 2000

D. . (missing numeric value)

Ans : D (missing). It returns missing value as amount will be 0.

SAS Log: NOTE: Mathematical operations could not be performed at the following places. The results of the operations have been set to missing values.

9. The following SAS program is submitted:

libname sasdata 'SAS-data-library';

data test;

set sasdata.chemists (keep = job_code);

if job_code = 'chem3'

then description = 'Senior Chemist';

run;

The variable JOB_CODE is a character variable with a length of 6 bytes.

Which one of the following is the length of the variable DESCRIPTION in the output data set?

A. 6 bytes

B. 8 bytes

C. 14 bytes

D. 200 bytes

Ans : C. The length of 'Senior Chemist' is 14.

10. Which one of the following statements is true regarding the name of a SAS array?

A. It is saved with the data set.

B. It can be used in procedures.

C. It exists only for the duration of the DATA step.

D. It can be the same as the name of a variable in the data set.

Ans : C.