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This test consists of 5 multiple choice questions, 5 short answer questions, and 10 short essay questions.

Multiple Choice Questions

1. What was the main form of communication in the late 1940s?
(a) Special couriers.
(b) The telegraph.
(c) The telephone.
(d) Letters.

2. Gleick presents his intention to trace the growth of both the concept of information and information itself by identifying what key elements?
(a) Society and culture.
(b) Origin and reliability of sources.
(c) Nation and type of governance.
(d) The people and thinking that contributed to it.

3. Why were there so many message errors with the early telegraph?
(a) Untrained workers.
(b) Passing the messages between too many operators.
(c) Poor weather conditions.
(d) Political unrest.

4. What society created the first numeric tables?
(a) Egyptian.
(b) Roman.
(c) Babylonian.
(d) Chinese.

5. Prior to the electric telegraph, an invention by the same name was created by Claude Chappe and his brothers during what conflict?
(a) World War I.
(b) The Spanish-American War.
(c) The Russian Revolution.
(d) The French Revolution.

Short Answer Questions

1. The invention of what technology would make Shannon's theory of a computing machine practical?

2. What new word did Claude Shannon, a mathematical researcher at Bell Labs, introduce in the in-house journal called "A Mathematical Theory of Communication"?

3. By 1930, what had replaced the telegraph as the most advanced means of communication?

4. How was the telephone superior to the telegraph?

5. What language do the drums of what is now Zaire mimic?

Short Essay Questions

1. What did Claude Shannon create from examining the statistical makeup of the English language?

2. What innovative device did Charles Babbage design and build?

3. What were examples of the use of mathematics in the Babylonian culture?

4. After the use of pictures, what were the next two stages of language development?

5. Who first at the concept of "bandwith" and in what context was it first conceived?

6. By reducing information to its elemental form, Claude Shannon opened up a new field of scientific inquiry that proved to have applications not only in communications, but in what other fields?

7. What innovation was made in the 17th century by Scot mathematician John Napier?

8. Who first conceived the idea of a machine that could think and under what circumstances?

9. What advanced form of communication was beginning to emerge in the 1840s?

10. What culture developed the earliest known method of writing language with the use of pictures to represent things?

(see the answer keys)

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