Input and Output Questions and Answers

Answer: A

Correct answer: True

The name is literal: peripheral means "at the edge", and these devices sit outside the processor and main memory, connected through controllers, buses and ports.

The distinction is architectural rather than physical. A hard disk inside the case is still a peripheral, because it is reached through a controller rather than being addressed directly as memory is. What defines the core is direct access by the processor; everything else surrounds it.

Answer: D

Correct answer: Input Devices

A trackball is a mouse turned over: the ball is rotated directly by the fingers and the movement is reported to the computer, so data flows in and it is an input device.

It belongs to the pointing device subclass along with the mouse, touchpad and touch screen. Its practical advantage is that the device itself does not move, which suits confined spaces and installations where a mouse would slide about - on ships, on aircraft flight decks and in industrial consoles.

Answer: C

Correct answer: Speaker

A speaker converts data held in the computer into sound the user can hear, so it carries information outward. Joysticks, barcode readers and webcams all capture information and send it into the machine.

Answer: A

Correct answer: Optical Mark Reader

An Optical Mark Reader detects the presence or absence of a pencil mark in a defined position, which is why answer sheets ask for a bubble to be filled completely. It differs from OCR, which recognises the shapes of characters themselves.

Answer: B

Correct answer: False

The E-13B character set used for MICR has fourteen characters: the ten digits 0 to 9 and four special symbols marking the transit, amount, on-us and dash fields on a cheque.

Restricting it to two would make it useless for printing account and cheque numbers, which is its whole purpose. The characters have a deliberately distinctive shape, with thick and thin strokes, so that each produces a waveform the read head can distinguish unambiguously.

Answer: A

Correct answer: Touch screen

A touch screen displays output and accepts input through the same surface, which is why it counts as both. A scanner and a light pen take input only, and a plotter produces output only.

Answer: A

Correct answer: Input device

A light pen senses the position on a screen where it is held and reports it to the computer, so information travels inward. It is a pointing device, in the same family as the mouse, trackball and stylus.

Answer: C

Correct answer: Digital Camera

A digital camera focuses an image onto a sensor - a CCD or CMOS array - which converts light into electrical charge and then into digital values, so the image arrives already in a form the computer can process.

A film camera captures an image too, but on chemical emulsion, which must be developed and scanned before a computer can use it. A memory card stores what the camera produces, and an indicator LED on the case captures nothing.

Answer: C

Correct answer: Webcams

A webcam is a digital video camera that produces a continuous stream rather than single frames, and the stream is sent over a network as it is captured - which is what "real-time" means here.

The distinction from a digital camera is the continuity and the immediacy: a still camera stores what it captures for later transfer. It is an input device, converting a physical scene into data, and a storage chip merely holds what some other device produced.