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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 culture was the first to use a written language?
(a) Chinese.
(b) Italian.
(c) English.
(d) Egyptian.

2. What caused the errors that were contained in the tables of logarithms that had to be calculated themselves?
(a) Printing errors.
(b) Under-educated workers.
(c) Calculations and printing errors.
(d) Calculations.

3. What was provided in "A Table Alphabeticall"?
(a) The history of alphabets.
(b) Word meanings.
(c) New words.
(d) Alphabets of the world.

4. In the prologue to "The Information", what year does Gleick identify as a crucial year in the history of information and computing?
(a) 1932.
(b) 1961.
(c) 1955.
(d) 1948.

5. How was the machine created by Charles Babbage received?
(a) It was very well received in academia.
(b) It was very well received in the mathematics community.
(c) It received government backing but was not considered practical.
(d) It failed to receive governmental backing.

Short Answer Questions

1. What is the system of dots and dashes used to communicate telegrams called?

2. What code did Claude Shannon apply to relay switches which could either be open or closed?

3. What were the interests of Charles Babbage, a brilliant Englishman who lived in the 19th century?

4. Who devised a way to multiply and divide numbers by adding or subtracting their logarithms?

5. Shannon proposed a solution for overcoming extra noise in his communication model that mimicked what early communicators?

Short Essay Questions

1. Who developed the Principia Mathematica and what did it provide?

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

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

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

5. By the 1930s the telephone had replace the telegraph as the most advanced means of communication. What advantages did the telephone have over the telegraph?

6. How was binary code of 0s and 1s which is the foundation for computing first conceived and by whom?

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

8. While Shannon worked on secret cryptography projects for the US government during World War II, what theory about information did he conceive?

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

10. 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?

(see the answer keys)

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