Technology Questions and Answers

Answer: A

Computers within a limited distance, connected to each other, form a local area network.

A LAN covers a building or campus and is owned by one organisation. A WAN spans a much greater distance and usually uses leased lines or public networks between its sites.

Answer: D

Firmware is stored in ROM.

It is the software built into a device - the BIOS, a router's operating code, a camera's control program - and must survive without power, which is why it is held in read-only or flash memory.

Answer: B

Multiprocessing is the option recorded here for two or more users working at the same time.

Multiprocessing means several processors executing simultaneously, which lets a system genuinely serve several users at once rather than by rapid switching.

Answer: A

Machine language is the lowest form of computer language.

It is binary code the processor executes directly, with no translation at all. Assembly is one step above it, and COBOL and Perl are high-level languages.

Answer: A

SQL is the language of databases.

Structured Query Language queries and manipulates relational databases. IBM developed it in the 1970s from Codd's relational model, and it is now standardised and supported by almost every database system.

Answer: A

Linus Torvalds created Linux.

He announced it in August 1991 as a hobby project while a student at Helsinki, and released it under the GPL. He still maintains the kernel, and also wrote Git.

Answer: A

An open document is held temporarily in RAM.

The file is read from disk into memory, where it can be accessed quickly and altered. Because RAM is volatile, unsaved changes are lost if power fails - which is why saving writes them back to disk.

Answer: B

A table is created with DDL - the Data Definition Language.

CREATE, ALTER and DROP define the structure of a database. DML manipulates the data within it - SELECT, INSERT, UPDATE, DELETE - and DCL controls permissions.

Answer: A

Memory sizes are expressed as powers of 2.

A kilobyte is \( 2^{10} = 1024 \) bytes, not 1,000. The reason is the address bus: n address lines select exactly \( 2^n \) locations, so memory comes in binary multiples.

Answer: C

USB stands for Universal Serial Bus.

Introduced in 1996, it replaced the separate serial, parallel, keyboard and mouse ports with one connector, supplies power as well as data, and allows devices to be connected and removed while the machine is running.