OFFICIAL EXPLANATION


This is more difficult since our answer choices are all bunched between 8 and 20 percent; we have to be fairly exact in our estimation. Reading the first two figures in the "Area Forested" column, we see that there are 32,460 thousand forested acres in New England and 50,686 thousand in the South, for a total of about 83,000 thousand acres. We want to know what percent this represents of all the forested land in the contiguous United States. (Contiguous means touching, so it means all the states that touch each other: everything except Hawaii and Alaska.) We're told the total area of forested land at the bottom of the table-715,194 thousand acres. Clearly 83,000 thousand is a little more than one tenth of 715,000 ; therefore, choice 3 (12\%) and choice 4 (15\%) are the only two that might be correct. Fifteen percent looks easier to work with than 12 percent, so let's see whether that can be right. Ten percent of 700,000 would be 70,000 , and 5 percent would be half of that, or 35,000 . Therefore, 15 percent would be about $70,000+35,000$ or 105,000 . Well this is far too much, so $12 \%$, must be right.