Final answer:
The question involves statistics within Mathematics, asking about the significance of a distribution of pet ownership among high school students at the 1 percent level, which would require a chi-square test.
Step-by-step explanation:
The subject of the student's question relates to Mathematics, specifically in the area of statistics. This is indicated by the context of the question which involves surveying a number of individuals (in this case, high school students) and analyzing the distribution of a variable (the number of pets students have at home).
To determine whether the distribution of the number of pets that students in the eastern United States have at home is significant at the 1 percent significance level, one would need to conduct a statistical test such as a chi-square goodness-of-fit test. This involves comparing the observed frequency of outcomes (in this case, the number of students with dogs, cats, or both) to the expected frequency of these outcomes for the population.
Examples provided in the prompt seem to be irrelevant snippets about pet ownership and data collection from various sources, but they illustrate common activities involved in gathering and analyzing statistical data.