Technology Questions and Answers

Answer: A

One byte is 8 bits.

Eight bits give \( 2^8 = 256 \) values, enough for a character set with letters, digits and punctuation, which is why the byte settled at that size and became the unit of memory.

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

Christopher Latham Sholes invented the typewriter keyboard.

He patented the first practical typewriter in 1868 and devised the QWERTY layout, arranging common letter pairs apart so the typebars would not jam. The layout outlived the mechanism entirely.

Answer: D

A firewall can be either hardware or software.

A software firewall runs on the machine it protects; a hardware firewall is a separate appliance guarding a whole network. Both filter traffic against a set of rules on address, port and protocol.

Answer: A

MBR stands for master boot record.

It is the first sector of a disk, holding the partition table and a small boot loader. Being only 512 bytes it limits disks to 2 TB and four primary partitions, which is why GPT has replaced it.

Answer: C

OSI stands for Open Systems Interconnection.

The OSI reference model divides networking into seven layers, from physical up to application. It is used as a teaching and design framework, though the internet actually runs on the simpler TCP/IP model.

Answer: A

DPI stands for dots per inch.

It measures the resolution of a printer or scanner. 300 dpi is normal for documents and 600 or more for photographic printing; screen resolution is measured in pixels per inch instead.

Answer: B

A CD-ROM is an optical disk.

Data is stored as pits and lands in a spiral track and read by the reflection of a laser. A magnetic disk stores data as magnetised regions on a coated platter, which is quite a different mechanism.

Answer: B

A batch file has the extension .bat.

It holds a list of commands the interpreter runs in sequence. AUTOEXEC.BAT, which ran automatically at startup, was the best known.

Answer: C

Files with the .mpg extension are video files.

MPEG defines the compression standards for moving pictures: MPEG-1 for the Video CD, MPEG-2 for DVD and digital broadcasting, MPEG-4 for most streaming.