Final Examination

The Graded Pass

This is the assessment the review bank prepared you for. Twenty questions, about two from each part, run one at a time. Pick an answer, submit it to see whether it was right and read why, then move on. At the end you get a score, a percentage, and a verdict. Seventy percent is a pass, ninety a distinction, and you can retake it as often as you like.

What Passing Means

Clearing this exam certifies two things, and the second matters more. First, that you can run the toolkit: bound a rock with Hashin-Shtrikman, mix a fluid with Batzle-Wang and Wood, substitute a fluid through Gassmann with its invariant shear modulus, place a sand on the soft, stiff, or contact-cement trend, read a carbonate through its pore aspect ratio, and separate a pressure change from a fluid change on the velocity ratio. Second, and this is the real subject of the course, that you can choose and calibrate the right model for the rock in front of you, and read its misfit honestly rather than trusting a transform built on the wrong family.

That judgment, the difference between a fizz sand and a pay sand, a cemented sand and a tight one, an overpressured sand and a gassy one, is what makes an interpreter rather than a calculator. With the course reviewed and examined, one part remains: the Lab, where every model you have met assembles into a single workbench and you drive the whole chain from rock to reflection yourself.

References

• Mavko, G., Mukerji, T., & Dvorkin, J. (2009). The Rock Physics Handbook (2nd ed.). Cambridge University Press.
• Avseth, P., Mukerji, T., & Mavko, G. (2005). Quantitative Seismic Interpretation. Cambridge University Press.