Final answer:
Economics is the study of how individuals and nations make choices about how to use scarce resources to fill their needs and wants. A resource is (a) something.
Step-by-step explanation:
Economics is a discipline that examines how individuals, families, businesses, and societies make decisions when confronted with scarcity. Scarcity is the fundamental economic problem of having seemingly unlimited human wants in a world of limited resources. The choices about how to allocate these scarce resources among competing uses or needs are at the heart of economics. A resource can be defined as something that is used to produce goods and services; these include tangible assets like labor, land, and raw materials, as well as intangible assets such as time.
Regarding the student's question, the best answer would be (a) something since a resource is indeed something that is both needed and used to produce goods and services. These resources are limited, and thus they are not anything or everything, definitely not nothing. In the context of economics, the term resource specifically refers to any factor of production (labor, capital, land, and entrepreneurship) that can be used to create value and produce goods and services. The answer is option a.