Technology Questions and Answers

Answer: B

MSD stands for most significant digit.

It is the leftmost digit, the one carrying the greatest weight; in binary the equivalent is the most significant bit. Which end of a stored number it occupies is the endianness question.

Answer: B

In immediate addressing the operand is contained in the instruction itself.

No memory access is needed to fetch it, so the instruction executes quickly, but the value is fixed at assembly time. It is used for constants.

Answer: A

LAT stands for Local Area Transport.

It was DEC's protocol for connecting terminals to hosts over Ethernet in the 1980s. Being non-routable, it worked only within a single local network.

Answer: D

All three - the cooling fan, expansion slots and network card - are internal parts of a computer.

They sit inside the case: the fan on the processor or chassis, the slots on the motherboard, and the network card in one of them or built into the board.

Answer: A

CRC stands for cyclic redundancy check.

The data is treated as a polynomial and divided by a fixed generator; the remainder is sent with the message and recomputed on arrival. It detects burst errors far more reliably than a simple checksum.

Answer: B

LCD stands for liquid crystal display.

Liquid crystals twist polarised light by an amount that depends on the voltage across them, so a pair of polarising filters turns that into light and dark. The crystals emit no light themselves, which is why a backlight is needed.

Answer: C

Both register select and chip select determine the address of an I/O interface.

Chip select picks the interface, using the high-order address lines, and register select picks which register within it, using the low-order lines.

Answer: C

A string of binary digits specifying an operation is an instruction code.

It divides into the operation code, which says what to do, and the address field, which says what to do it to.

Answer: A

VDU stands for visual display unit.

It is the older term for a monitor, from the days when a screen and keyboard together formed a terminal attached to a central computer.

Answer: C

The range of colours depends on the number of bits associated with each pixel.

n bits give \( 2^n \) colours: 8 bits give 256, 16 bits give 65,536, and 24-bit true colour gives about 16.7 million - more than the eye can distinguish.