Thread: Analytical Interview Questions: How much cat litter is sold in the US each year?

How much cat litter is sold in the US annually? (assuming your are not able to directly query store sales or anything of that nature). For fun, and to try and sharpen my mind a bit I like to find analytical questions that employers will surprise candidates with in an interview.

With these type of questions I try to break it down one component at a time. Here was my framework for this particular question.

• Households in the US (Census Bureau)
• % of Households that own cats (source for this information?)
• average amount of cats per a household (source for this information?)
• how much cat litter does average cat per year (source for this information?)

Households in US * % Households with Cats * Average amount of cats per household * Average amount of cat litter used per cat annually = estimate of total cat litter sold in US annually

Thanks

This type of questions is known as Fermi questions. It is one of the events in the Science Olympiad for US high school students. But what is your specific question for this forum? Is it where to find the data you mentioned? In answering such question, one hopes that one does not need precise statistics and that errors in the common sense estimates of the intermediate values (number of households, average number of cats, etc.) will cancel out.

Originally Posted by emakarov

This type of questions is known as Fermi questions. It is one of the events in the Science Olympiad for US high school students. But what is your specific question for this forum? Is it where to find the data you mentioned? In answering such question, one hopes that one does not need precise statistics and that errors in the common sense estimates of the intermediate values (number of households, average number of cats, etc.) will cancel out.

My question was what would the framework for this question look like, in this case average cat litter sold annually in the US. I was unsure how to correctly solve it, but I put down my steps anyways.

Hi,
I feel like I might need to brush up on my planning knowledge just in case someone actually calls for an interview!

I found some references on this subject, please refer to everyone here: Caterpillar interview questions
Best regards.