1. The electronic device inside the computer that can be flipped to an on or off state is called a:
A. bit.
B. switch.
C. button.
D. binary component.
2. The earliest electronic switches in computers were:
A. integrated circuits.
B. transistors.
C. vacuum tubes.
D. magnetic core.
3. A major disadvantage of vacuum tubes as computing switches is that they:
A. cannot conduct electricity.
B. generate too much heat.
C. cannot represent binary language symbols.
D. are too small for significant computing tasks.
4. Chip is a common nickname for:
A. transistor.
B. integrated circuit.
C. resistor.
D. semiconductor.
5. The first microprocessors were created using:
A. hertz.
B. vacuum tubes.
C. integrated circuits.
D. digital dividers.
6. Today’s chips are composed of tens of millions of:
A. vacuum tubes.
B. transistors.
C. digital dividers.
D. hertz.
7. Computer arithmetic is accomplished using the ____________ number system.
A. binary
B. octal
C. decimal
D. hexadecimal
8. The binary number 101001 translates into the decimal number:
A. 28.
B. 41.
C. 67.
D. 128.
9. The decimal number 133 translates into the binary number:
A. 11001111.
B. 11100011.
C. 10101010.
D. 10000101.
10. An eight-bit character representation commonly used in most modern-day PCs is:
A. ASCII.
B. EBCDIC.
C. Unicode.
D. Assembly.
11. Unicode’s advantage over ASCII is that it:
A. requires less storage space.
B. supports character representation of many international languages.
C. allows a maximum of 256 different characters to be represented.
D. provides a hexadecimal notation for CPU processing.
12. Clock speed in modern PC processors is measured in:
A. Mbps.
B. GHz.
C. milliseconds.
D. GB.
13. The CPU’s machine cycle actions are synchronized by the:
A. system clock.
B. register.
C. pipeline.
D. control unit.
14. The proper sequence of actions in a machine cycle is:
A. decode à fetch à execute à store.
B. fetch à decode à execute à store.
C. fetch à execute à decode à store.
D. execute à decode à store à fetch.
15. Fetched instructions are placed into ____________ to be executed.
A. the instruction set
B. Level 1 cache
C. registers
D. Level 2 cache
16. The most frequently used instructions of a computer program are likely to be fetched from:
A. the hard disk.
B. cache memory.
C. RAM.
D. registers.
17.
____________
is a block of memory located on the CPU chip itself.
A. Level 1 cache
B. Level A cache
C. Dynamic RAM
D. Flash memory
18. The ____________ is responsible for decoding instructions.
A. ALU
B. Level 1 cache
C. Level 2 cache
D. control unit
19. The portion of the machine cycle performed by the arithmetic logic unit is the _____________ stage.
A. store
B. execute
C. fetch
D. decode
20. Which of the following forms of random access memory does NOT require recharging of capacitors?
A. DRAM
B. SRAM
C. RDRAM
D. SDRAM
21. A system’s local bus runs between the:
A. motherboard and system ports.
B.
CPU and main
C.
hard disk and the main
D. control unit and the CPU’s registers.
22. A bus’s data transfer speed is determined by its:
A. word size and clock speed.
B. word size and RAM type.
C. bus width and clock speed.
D. expansion settings and clock speed.
23. Pipelining refers to:
A. splitting an instruction into pieces, with each sent to a separate processor.
B. processing multiple instructions simultaneously, each at a different stage of the machine cycle.
C. applying a common instruction to multiple data items at the same time.
D. installing several CPUs into the computer, in order to enable processing instructions in parallel.