Technology Questions and Answers

Answer: B

DTP stands for desktop publishing.

It is the preparation of printed material on a personal computer, combining text, images and layout on screen. Aldus PageMaker on the Macintosh in 1985, with the LaserWriter, began it.

Answer: C

Internet access speed is measured in kbps - kilobits per second.

Note that it is bits, not bytes: a connection of 1,024 kbps transfers about 128 kilobytes a second. RAM is memory, MHz a clock speed and megabytes a quantity of storage.

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: B

Another name for a computer chip is a microchip.

It is an integrated circuit - thousands to billions of transistors formed on a single wafer of silicon. A microprocessor is one particular kind of chip, the one that executes instructions.

Answer: D

Linux is an operating system.

Linus Torvalds released the kernel in 1991 under a free licence. With the GNU tools around it, it now runs most web servers, all the top supercomputers and, through Android, most phones.

Answer: B

A .BAT file is a system batch file.

It contains a list of commands that the command interpreter runs in sequence, as if typed at the prompt. AUTOEXEC.BAT, which ran at startup, was the best known.

Answer: A

FET stands for field effect transistor.

The current between source and drain is controlled by the electric field of the voltage on the gate, which draws almost no current. That high input impedance is why FETs, and MOSFETs in particular, are used in almost all integrated circuits.

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.

Answer: B

Microsoft Windows is an operating system.

It manages the hardware, schedules processes, handles memory and files, and provides the graphical interface that applications run in. It has been the dominant desktop operating system since the early 1990s.

Answer: D

Three types of laser are gas, solid state and diode.

Gas lasers such as helium-neon and carbon dioxide use a gas discharge; solid state lasers use a crystal such as ruby or Nd:YAG; and diode lasers use a semiconductor junction, which is what is in every CD player and laser pointer.