Technology Questions and Answers

Answer: C

James Gosling created Java, at Sun Microsystems in 1995.

Its compiled bytecode runs on a virtual machine rather than directly on the processor, which is the basis of its 'write once, run anywhere' promise.

Answer: D

Oracle is the organisation concerned with databases.

Its relational database, released in 1979, was the first commercial implementation of Codd's model and remains dominant in large enterprises. Asus, Intel and Motorola are hardware makers.

Answer: A

Access time is the time required to locate and retrieve stored data.

For a hard disk it is seek time plus rotational latency plus transfer time, typically a few milliseconds; for RAM it is measured in nanoseconds. The gap between the two is why caching matters so much.

Answer: C

A LAN card is also called a NIC - network interface card.

It provides the physical connection to the network and handles the data link layer, and carries a unique MAC address burned in at manufacture.

Answer: C

PrtScr captures the screen.

Print Screen copies the whole desktop to the clipboard; Alt+PrtScr copies only the active window. Scroll Lock and SysRq are legacy keys with almost no use today.

Answer: C

Car is not a network topology.

The topologies are bus, ring, star, mesh and tree. They describe how the nodes are connected: a bus shares one cable, a ring passes signals round a loop, and a star centres on a hub or switch.

Answer: C

A set of instructions telling a computer to perform a task is a program.

An assembler and a debugger are themselves programs that assist in producing one, and a flowchart is a diagram of the logic rather than something the machine can execute.

Answer: C

Device drivers are system software.

A driver translates the operating system's generic requests into the specific commands a particular device understands, and runs with high privilege - which is why a faulty driver can crash the whole system.

Answer: A

The router directs traffic.

It reads the destination IP address of each packet and forwards it towards the right network, choosing the path from its routing table. A switch works within one network by MAC address, and a hub simply repeats everything to every port.

Answer: D

L cannot be a hexadecimal digit.

Hexadecimal is base 16 and uses 0 to 9 and then A to F for the values 10 to 15. Sixteen symbols are needed, and the letters stop at F.