Technology Questions and Answers

Answer: C

Turning the computer's ones and zeros into characters a person can read is decoding.

The bits are mapped to characters by a code such as ASCII or Unicode, in which each letter has a numeric value - A is 65 in ASCII.

Answer: C

The supercomputer is the most powerful type.

It is measured in floating-point operations per second, and the fastest now exceed an exaflop. Such machines are used for weather forecasting, climate modelling, molecular simulation and nuclear research.

Answer: C

Output devices are commonly called terminals.

The word originally meant a keyboard and screen at the end of a line to a central computer - the terminus of the connection - and came to be used for the display end generally.

Answer: C

A .TMP file is a temporary file.

Programs create them to hold intermediate data - an unsaved document, an extracted archive, a print spool - and normally delete them on exit. Files left behind by crashes accumulate and can be cleared safely.

Answer: B

A JPG is a format for an image file.

JPEG compresses photographs by discarding the fine detail the eye notices least, achieving ten- or twentyfold reduction. Because the loss is cumulative, an image should be edited in a lossless format and saved as JPEG only at the end.

Answer: A

A compact disc holds 74 minutes of music under the original specification.

The story is that Sony's Norio Ohga insisted the disc hold Beethoven's Ninth Symphony complete, which fixed the diameter at 120 mm. Later discs stretched the format to 80 minutes.

Answer: C

TTL here stands for time to live.

It is a counter in each IP packet, decremented by every router it passes. When it reaches zero the packet is discarded, which stops undeliverable packets circulating forever. The traceroute tool works by exploiting it.

Answer: A

Konrad Zuse built the Z1, the first binary programmable computer, in his parents' living room in Berlin between 1936 and 1938.

It was mechanical, used binary floating-point arithmetic and read its program from punched film. It was destroyed in an air raid in 1943.

Answer: D

The address bus specifies the memory location.

The processor puts the address on it and the memory returns or accepts the contents on the data bus. The width of the address bus fixes how much memory can be addressed - 32 lines give 4 GB.

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.