How things work college course/Computer quiz

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This quiz covers Wikipedia's Computer (Wikipedia permalink) and its links: w:Turing machine * w:Busy beaver * w:Halting problem * w:Bombe. For another quiz on this topic, see Turing machine quiz.

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For on-screen use, this version of the quiz can be used as a pre-reading activity for Wikipedia:Computer. An excellent homework assignment might be to ask students to submit more quiz questions to Wikiversity.[1]

Computer (Wikipedia article)

1. The first English-language usage of the word "computer" referred to

counting rods
an abacus
Roman numerals
a person

2. Babbage's account of the origin of the difference engine in the 1820s was that he was working to satisfy the Astronomical Society's desire to improve The Nautical Almanac.

true
false

3. Babbage's account of the origin of the difference engine in the 1820s was that he was working to satisfy the Astronomical Society's desire to predict lunar eclipses

true
false

4. Babbage's use of punch cards in the 1930s to solve a problem posed by the Astronomical Society was later adopted to the Jacquard loom.

true
false

5. Babbage's use of punch cards in the 1930s to solve a problem posed by the Astronomical Society was preceded by such use on the Jacquard loom.

true
false

6. A system that uses levers, pulleys, or other mechanical device to perform calculations is called an analog computer

true
false

7. A system that uses tables of numbers is called an analog computer

true
false

8. Analog computers were phased out by the dawn of the twentieth century (circa 1900)

true
false

9. Analog computers continued to be developed into the twentieth century

true
false

10. The Turing machine permitted a solution to the halting problem

true
false

11. The Turing machine could not have been invented until after the halting problem was solved.

true
false

12. The Turing machine was a(n) ______ device

digital
electromechanical
prototype
conceptual
analog

13. This algorithm halts if it starts at 0:
* Add 3
* If the number is divisible by 10, divide by 10
* Stop if the number exceeds 100
* Go to top

true
false

14. This algorithm halts if it starts at 0:
* Add 3
* If the number is divisible by 10, add 10
* Stop if the number exceeds 100
* Go to top

true
false

15. In London (circa 1935) thousands of vacuum tubes were used to

calculate the value of π
control a telephone exchange
count votes in an election
control a textile mill

16. The Bombe was a(n) ______________ device used (circa 1940) to defeat the Enigma machine in World War II.

mechanical
electric digital programmable
Turing-complete
electromechanical

17. The Colossus, used to defeat the German Enigma machine during World War II in 1944, was

Turing-complete
mechanical
electric digital programmable
electromechanical

18. The chronological order by which electronic computers advanced is:

transistors, integrated circuits, and then tubes
tubes, transistors, and then integrated circuits
integrated circuits, tubes, and then transistors
tubes, integrated circuits and then transistors

Your score is 0 / 0

Footnotes and references

  1. ↑ Feel free to submit ideas for more questions on the talk page to this article: Talk:How_things_work_college_course/Computer_quiz
This article is issued from Wikiversity - version of the Wednesday, August 05, 2015. The text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share Alike but additional terms may apply for the media files.