Technology Questions and Answers

Answer: B

Light in a laser is amplified by stimulated emission.

A passing photon triggers an excited atom to emit a second photon identical to it in frequency, phase and direction, so one photon becomes two, two become four, and the beam builds up. The acronym stands for light amplification by stimulated emission of radiation.

Answer: C

WinRAR is not application software in the ordinary sense - it is a utility.

Utilities maintain and manage the computer rather than doing productive work for the user. Dreamweaver, Photoshop and Sage are applications for web design, image editing and accounting.

Answer: D

.gif is an image extension.

The Graphics Interchange Format uses lossless compression on a palette of up to 256 colours and supports animation and transparency. .ppt, .lib and .doc are a presentation, a library and a document.

Answer: B

EPROM stands for erasable programmable read-only memory.

It is programmed electrically and erased by strong ultraviolet light through a quartz window in the package, which is why such chips carried a covering label.

Answer: A

An FET's terminals are the drain, gate and source.

Current flows from source to drain through a channel whose width is controlled by the voltage on the gate. The gate is insulated or reverse-biased, so it draws almost no current.

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: A

MS-DOS does not implement true multitasking.

It runs one program at a time; a terminate-and-stay-resident program can lurk in memory but is not scheduled alongside. Windows 98, NT and XP all provide real multitasking.

Answer: C

ADC stands for analog to digital converter.

It samples a continuously varying voltage at intervals and represents each sample as a binary number. Resolution is the number of bits per sample and sampling rate the number of samples per second.

Answer: C

PPTP stands for Point-to-Point Tunneling Protocol.

It wraps PPP frames inside IP packets to create a virtual private network across the public internet. It is now considered insecure, and IPsec, OpenVPN and WireGuard have replaced it.

Answer: C

The second harmonic is twice the fundamental frequency.

Any periodic wave can be resolved into a fundamental and harmonics at integer multiples of it. The relative strength of those harmonics is what makes a violin and a flute sound different at the same pitch.