Final answer:
Exxon likely measures its vast amount of data in petabytes (PB) or more, as this unit is suitable for representing large-scale corporate and big data project sizes. The correct answer is D.
Step-by-step explanation:
Exxon, being a large multinational corporation, undoubtedly deals with a very large volume of data for its operations, including geological surveys, business transactions, and various other data sets. The question asks what data measurement unit would likely be used to quantify such data. Given the vast amount of information that a company like Exxon would handle, it is reasonable to assume that their data size would be in the range of petabytes (PB) or more.
For reference, computer storage space is often measured in units of increasing size, where each larger unit is 1024 times the size of the previous one. A kilobyte (KB) is 1024 bytes, a megabyte (MB) is 1024 KB, a gigabyte (GB) is 1024 MB, and a terabyte (TB) is 1024 GB. However, when it comes to an even more vast collection of data, such as that which large corporations or big data projects have, we refer to petabytes, which is 1024 TB.
For example, the Sloan Survey in astronomy recorded over 15 TB of data, which is comparable to the volume of information in the Library of Congress. When industries like astronomy or energy are dealing with data on this scale, they have entered into the era of Big Data, which requires petabytes to accurately describe their data volume.