Input and Output Questions and Answers

Answer: C

Correct answer: resolution

Resolution is the number of pixels the screen displays, so a higher count packs more detail into the same area. Refresh rate governs how smoothly motion appears and colour depth how many shades can be shown, neither of which is sharpness.

Answer: C

Correct answer: Storage

A storage bay, or drive bay, is a standard-sized opening in the system case into which a drive is fitted - a hard disk, a solid state drive or an optical drive.

The standardisation is the point: bays come in defined sizes, historically 3.5 and 5.25 inches, so that drives from any manufacturer fit any case. The term describes the space and its mountings rather than any device, which is why it is named for the class of hardware it accommodates.

Answer: C

Correct answer: Digital Camera

A digital camera focuses the image onto a sensor array, which converts light into charge and then into digital values, so what it captures is already in the form the computer needs.

A film camera captures an image too, but chemically, and it must be developed and then scanned before a computer can use it. A memory card only stores what the camera produced, and an indicator LED on the case captures nothing at all.

Answer: D

Correct answer: Fax machine

Facsimile means "an exact copy", and the machine sends one over a telephone line: it scans a page into a signal, transmits it, and the receiving machine prints it back out.

So a fax machine is a scanner and a printer combined with a modem, which is why it is sometimes described as either - but the term for the whole is the fax machine, and the whole is more than either half. Its function is transmission, which neither a scanner nor a printer performs.

Answer: C

Correct answer: Speech Synthesizers

A speech synthesiser converts text into audible speech, so it is an output device - the counterpart of speech recognition, which converts speech into text and is an input function.

Modern systems work by concatenating recorded fragments or by generating the waveform from a model, and the difficulty is prosody rather than pronunciation: producing the rhythm and intonation that make a sentence sound natural rather than a string of correctly pronounced words.

Answer: A

Correct answer: Inkjet

Speeds in the range of tens to a few hundred characters per second describe a character printer, which forms one character at a time.

An ink-jet works that way, moving a head across the paper. A laser printer prints a whole page at once and is quoted in pages per minute, and a drum printer prints a whole line at a time and is quoted in lines per minute - both far faster and measured in different units, which is what places them outside this range.

Answer: B

Correct answer: Soft copy

Soft copy is output that exists only while it is being displayed - an image on a screen, sound from a speaker - and it vanishes when the display changes or the power goes.

Hard copy is output on a physical medium that persists, which is what a printer produces. The distinction is not about quality or permanence of the data but about the medium: the same document is soft copy on screen and hard copy once printed.

Answer: C

Correct answer: It produces faster, quieter and higher-quality output

A laser printer fuses toner to the page without striking it, giving sharp output at speed and with little noise. The one thing it cannot do is print through multi-part stationery, which remains the dot matrix printer’s niche.

Answer: B

Correct answer: Output

An output device is the one that carries information from the computer to the person - the monitor, the printer, the speakers. Input devices carry information the other way.

Answer: B

Correct answer: MICR

Magnetic Ink Character Recognition prints the cheque number, branch and account codes in ink containing iron oxide. Because the reader senses magnetism rather than shape, an overprinted stamp or a signature across the line does not defeat it.