Technology Questions and Answers

Answer: C

Assembly language is a low-level programming language.

Each statement corresponds to one machine instruction, but written as a mnemonic such as MOV or ADD rather than a binary code. An assembler translates it, and it is specific to one processor family.

Answer: D

The High Frequency band runs from 3 to 30 MHz.

HF waves are reflected by the ionosphere, so they can travel thousands of kilometres by skywave, which is why short-wave broadcasting, amateur radio and long-range aviation use the band.

Answer: B

The fifth generation of computers is reckoned from about 1980.

It is characterised by ULSI chips, parallel processing and work on artificial intelligence - the term came from Japan's Fifth Generation Computer Systems project announced in 1981.

Answer: C

Computers calculate in binary.

A transistor is either conducting or not, so two states are natural and reliable; ten voltage levels would be far harder to distinguish. All arithmetic is done in base two and converted to decimal only for display.

Answer: B

The three Boolean operators are AND, OR and NOT.

AND narrows a search to results containing both terms, OR widens it to either, and NOT excludes. George Boole set out the algebra in 1854, and it underlies both search and digital logic.

Answer: A

The two types of RAM are static and dynamic.

Static RAM holds each bit in a flip-flop and needs no refreshing, so it is fast but bulky and expensive; it is used for cache. Dynamic RAM stores each bit as charge on a capacitor and must be refreshed thousands of times a second, but is far denser and cheaper.

Answer: B

David Filo and Jerry Yang developed Yahoo, in 1994, as PhD students at Stanford.

It began as 'Jerry and David's Guide to the World Wide Web', a hand-built directory of sites, and was the dominant web portal of the late 1990s.

Answer: A

WWW stands for the World Wide Web.

Tim Berners-Lee proposed it at CERN in 1989 and built the first server and browser in 1990. It is the system of linked hypertext documents that runs over the internet, not the internet itself.

Answer: B

A DV camcorder is used to create digital video.

DV records video digitally on tape at about 25 Mbps, and transfers it to a computer over FireWire without any loss of quality - which is what put video editing within reach of ordinary users in the late 1990s.

Answer: D

Charles Babbage designed the Analytical Engine.

Conceived in 1837, it had a store for numbers, a mill to compute with them, punched-card input and conditional branching - the elements of a general-purpose computer. It was never built in his lifetime.