Hash tables are the most useful data structure when looking up people in databases by their social security number.
Hash table is a data structure where data is stored in an associative way. In a hash table, data is kept in an array format, in which each data value is associated with its own unique index value. If the index of the desired data is known, it becomes very fast to access the data from the hash table. Therefore, the hash table is known to be the quicker method for searching a bulk of data such as searching social security number of people in the database.
Thus, in the context of this question, a hash table is the most suitable data structure to use for looking up persons by their social security number. The social security number of the persons in the hash table represents a unique index value, with associated records of each individual person.
Whenever, the specific person is to be searched by social security number, the hash table simply maps the entered social security number with that of index value in the hash table. Upon getting a matched value, the hash table returns the record of the person to be looked up.
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