Technology Questions and Answers

Answer: C

The home page of a website is its first page - the one a visitor arrives at by default.

It usually carries the main navigation, from which the rest of the site is reached. It is the file the server returns for the bare domain name.

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: C

An FET is a field effect transistor.

The voltage on the gate creates an electric field that widens or narrows the channel between source and drain, controlling the current through it. Because the gate draws almost no current, the input impedance is very high.

Answer: A

A dual-layer DVD is valued because it holds more data.

A second recording layer beneath the first, read through it by refocusing the laser, raises capacity from 4.7 GB to 8.5 GB - enough for a feature film at higher quality.

Answer: C

A capacitor stores charge.

Two conducting plates are separated by an insulator; applying a voltage moves charge onto one plate and off the other, and the charge stays when the source is removed. Capacitors smooth power supplies, tune radios and couple amplifier stages.

Answer: D

ISP stands for internet service provider.

It is the company that connects a subscriber to the internet, and usually supplies an IP address, a mail service and a domain name service as well.

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: A

Modem is short for modulator–demodulator.

It modulates the computer's digital data onto an analogue carrier for transmission down a telephone line, and demodulates the incoming signal back into data at the other end.

Answer: D

A BJT's terminals are the emitter, base and collector.

The emitter supplies the charge carriers, the thin base controls them and the collector gathers them. Drain, gate and source belong to a field effect transistor, and anode and cathode to a diode.

Answer: A

Correct answer: A laser beam

A CD drive shines a laser at the disc and detects the change in reflection at the edges of microscopic pits. Because nothing touches the surface, the disc does not wear with repeated reading, unlike magnetic tape.