SAS Institute A00-215 - SAS Certified Associate: Programming Fundamentals Using SAS 9.4

The PROC CONTENTS step in SAS is used to display metadata about a SAS dataset, including information such as the names of variables, types of variables (numeric or character), lengths of variables, and other attributes like formats, labels, and indexes. Therefore, the correct answer is:

A) a report showing the descriptor portion of the REVENUE data set

The descriptor portion of a SAS data set contains metadata about the dataset's structure, not the actual data values or any specific information about individual variables beyond their structure and definition in the dataset. Options B, C, and D suggest details that are not part of the dataset's descriptor information as shown by PROC CONTENTS.

References: SAS 9.4 Procedures Guide: Statistical Procedures.

The PROC MEANS report shown in the image displays statistics for a single variable Age with no decimal places. The correct SAS code to generate such a report is option D, which uses the PROC MEANS procedure with the maxdec=0 option to control the number of decimal places displayed (in this case, zero) and specifies Age as the analysis variable using the var statement.

The PROC MEANS procedure computes descriptive statistics for numeric variables. The maxdec=0 option is used here to remove decimal places from the report output, which matches the output shown where the mean, standard deviation, minimum, and maximum are all integers.

The other options are incorrect for the following reasons:

A uses the class statement, which is not appropriate here because Age is not a classification variable but an analysis variable.

B uses the group statement, which is not a valid statement in the PROC MEANS procedure.

C uses the by statement, which requires the data to be sorted by the BY variable and does not fit the output provided since it would produce separate statistics for each value of Age.

References:

SAS 9.4 documentation for the PROC MEANS statement: SAS Help Center: PROC MEANS

The correct answer is C. To create the NODONATIONS dataset, which includes only the employees who did not make any donations, a merge operation is used with a conditional statement to filter out those records. The syntax if inE=1 and inD=0; ensures that the merged dataset includes only the observations from the EMPLOYEES dataset that do not have a corresponding observation in the DONATIONS dataset. This is achieved using data step processing with the in= option to create temporary variables that indicate whether the data is coming from the input dataset.

In the other options:

A is incorrect because inE=0 and inD=0 will never be true after a merge since at least one of the datasets must contribute to the merged observation.

B lacks the necessary conditional logic to filter out employees with donations.

D is incorrect because if inE=1 and inD=1; would actually select employees who made donations, the opposite of what we want.

References:

SAS documentation on merging data sets using the DATA step.