"Estimate how many gas stations are in the US" — how do you handle a market-sizing brainteaser?

How to answer

Don't freeze or guess a number. Talk through your structure out loud: start from a population base (~330M), build assumptions (people per car, cars per station, fill-ups per week), arrive at a defensible range. State assumptions explicitly and sanity-check against intuition. The logic and calm delivery matter far more than the exact figure.

Key idea: Blurting a number with no reasoning, or going silent. Both kill you — they can't see your thinking, which is the entire point.