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This quiz consists of 5 multiple choice and 5 short answer questions through Chapter 10.

Multiple Choice Questions

1. What language do the drums of what is now Zaire mimic?
(a) Kele.
(b) Zulu.
(c) Swahili
(d) Bantu.

2. What was the goal of James Murray when he wrote the first Oxford English Dictionary in 1879?
(a) To alphabetize all words.
(b) To limit the work to only proper English.
(c) To catalog the entire English language.
(d) To provide the pronunciation of all words.

3. Who wrote the work known as the Principia Mathematica?
(a) Aristotle and Epecruis.
(b) Galileo and Copernicus.
(c) Bertrand Russell and Alfred North Whitehead.
(d) Edwin Hubble and Isaac Newton.

4. In what manner was "A Table Alphabeticall" arranged?
(a) Alphabetically.
(b) By importance.
(c) By frequency of use.
(d) By popularity.

5. Schrodinger and others theorized that genes had what role in life?
(a) They are a kind of code for identifying an organism.
(b) They are a kind of code for constructing an organism.
(c) They are a kind of code for constructing an human cells.
(d) They are a kind of marker for cell multification.

Short Answer Questions

1. What was changing language at the time the first English dictionary was developed?

2. A psychologist named George Miller noticed that people seem to be able to easily remember up to how many items at a time?

3. Entropy is the physical equivalent of what state?

4. What is the modern meaning of "entropy"? "Entropy was not a kind of energy or an amount of energy," Gleick writes (p. 271). It was instead an abstract measurement of the unavailability of energy.

5. In the prologue to "The Information", what year does Gleick identify as a crucial year in the history of information and computing?

(see the answer key)

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