What was the average US gas price by year from 1970 to 2024?

1. What the supplied evidence actually claims — and why it fails the question

All three supplied items report that the content they reference is unrelated to US gasoline price history. One source concerns operating systems and programming questions, another deals with Java class code for a chessboard, and the third addresses programming inputs and outputs; none include economic or price series data. Because the materials explicitly contain no gasoline price time series, they provide no basis to compute or confirm average annual US gas prices for any year between 1970 and 2024. The supplied analyses therefore lead to a single factual conclusion: the current evidence set is non-responsive to the user’s request ^{[1] [2] [3]}.

2. What a valid answer would require — dataset and methodological checklist

Answering “average US gas price by year, 1970–2024” requires a clear data source and methodology: an authoritative national series such as the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) weekly or annual gasoline price series, or the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Consumer Price Index gasoline component, ideally with specification whether prices are nominal or inflation-adjusted. The methodology must state whether the annual figure is a calendar-year average of monthly/weekly spot prices or a formal year-average published by an agency, and whether prices are for regular unleaded retail gallon averages. None of these methodological anchors are present in the provided sources, so the current packet cannot be used to produce or validate the requested annual series ^{[1] [2] [3]}.

3. Consequences of using unrelated technical sources — risks and pitfalls

Relying on the supplied programming and technical Q&A content to answer an economic data question would introduce obvious errors: no extrapolation, imputation, or inference can reliably transform code-discussion text into historical price series. Using unrelated documents risks producing fabricated values or misleading claims. For accurate research, one must avoid cross-domain assumption leaps; the provided materials explicitly indicate their irrelevance, so any attempt to answer the original question based on them would be unfounded. In short, the lack of domain-relevant sources precludes safe factual reporting on gas price history ^{[1] [2] [3]}.

4. Recommended authoritative sources and how they resolve the gap

To fill the data gap, consult primary data repositories that compile national gasoline price series. The EIA maintains weekly and annual retail gasoline price data dating back decades and provides both nominal and real (inflation-adjusted) figures, while the BLS provides CPI gasoline components for adjusting to constant dollars. Academic databases and historical statistical abstracts also supply validated series. These sources would allow producing a year-by-year table from 1970 to 2024 with clear notes on nominal vs. real prices and any methodological caveats. The current packet, however, contains none of these sources, so such data cannot be extracted from it ^{[1] [2] [3]}.

5. Next steps to obtain a verifiable answer and reproducible output

To produce the requested yearly averages and ensure reproducibility, submit one or more of the following: direct links or files from the EIA or BLS series, a CSV or Excel file containing yearly averages, or permission to fetch public EIA/BLS data. Specify whether you want nominal prices or inflation-adjusted real prices (and which base year for adjustment). With those inputs, I can compute or verify the annual averages for 1970–2024, document data sources and calculation steps, and produce a year-by-year table. The current evidence package does not permit any of these downstream tasks because it lacks relevant economic data ^{[1] [2] [3]}.