Final answer:
The VAR statement is used in a PROC MEANS step to specify the numeric columns to analyze in the SAS software, the correct option is C).
Step-by-step explanation:
In a PROC MEANS step within the SAS software, the statement used to specify which numeric columns to analyze is the VAR statement. This statement allows you to list the variables of interest that you want PROC MEANS to compute statistics for. For example, if you have a dataset with columns for age, weight, and height and you only want to analyze age and weight, your VAR statement would look like this:
PROC MEANS DATA=your_dataset;
VAR age weight;
RUN;
This would instruct SAS to compute the descriptive statistics such as mean, standard deviation, minimum, and maximum for only the columns age and weight. Options like TABLES or KEEP= are not used in the PROC MEANS step for this purpose. TABLES is used in PROC FREQ, and KEEP= is a dataset option to specify the variables to keep in a dataset.