Question

Suppose you have a data file called "that.dat" that begins with the following line

"MSA" "gmp" "pcgmp"
"Abilene, TX" 3.887e+0924490
"Akron, OH" 2.2998e+1032889
"Albany, GA" 3.955e+0924269
... (additional lines omitted) After you read "that.dat" into a data frame with the following command,
read.table(file="that. dat")
what type is the last column (column 3) in the resulting data frame? a.numeric
b.integer
c.double
d.character
e.factor

Answer 1

The last column in the data frame resulting from 'that.dat' would be read as type 'double', which represents floating-point numbers in R.

Step-by-step explanation:

When you read a data file into an R data frame using the read.table function, the function tries to guess the correct data type for each column based on its contents. Since the last column in the file "that.dat" appears to have values like 3.887e+09 and 3.955e+09, which represent exponential notation for numbers, R will typically interpret these as numeric values, more specifically of type double. This data type is used in R to represent floating-point numbers, which are numbers that can have a fractional part.