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This test consists of 15 multiple choice questions and 5 short answer questions.

Multiple Choice Questions

1. What uses one symbol to represent one "minimal sound"?
(a) Radio waves.
(b) The alphabet.
(c) Morse code.
(d) Sub-Saharan drums.

2. What was the Morse code based on?
(a) Dots and dashes.
(b) The alphabet.
(c) Symbols.
(d) Numbers.

3. What word book by Robert Cawdrey was published first in 1604?
(a) The Written Word.
(b) A Table Alphabeticall.
(c) Oxford English Dictionary.
(d) The English Language.

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

5. Before "A Table Alphabeticall", how were most catalogs and word lists arranged?
(a) By order of the king's scribe.
(b) By topic.
(c) By order of the philosophers.
(d) By frequency of use.

6. Who invented the telegraph?
(a) Albert Einstein.
(b) Alexander Graham Bell.
(c) Thomas Edison.
(d) Samuel Morse.

7. What were the interests of Charles Babbage, a brilliant Englishman who lived in the 19th century?
(a) Philosophy and psychology.
(b) The history of discovery and travel.
(c) Prose and poetry.
(d) Mathematics, engineering, cryptography, railroads, and industrial machinery.

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

9. What culture grouped characters in categories such as tools, weapons, plants, animals, and buildings?
(a) The Chinese.
(b) The Egyptians.
(c) The Inca Culture.
(d) The Italians.

10. What was the Morse code comprised of?
(a) Symbols.
(b) Short pulses, called dots, and long pulses, called dashes.
(c) Numbers.
(d) Letters.

11. Why did businessmen immediately take to the telegraph?
(a) Businessmen could save money on travel expenses.
(b) Businesses did not have to hire as many workers.
(c) Orders and market information could be transmitted quickly over long distances.
(d) Orders no longer had to be hand written.

12. What machine was constructed by Charles Babbage?
(a) The calculator.
(b) The computer.
(c) The difference analyzer.
(d) The difference engine.

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

14. How were phonetic sounds represented in language?
(a) By characters.
(b) By images.
(c) By numbers.
(d) By codes.

15. What did Alan Turing reduce human thought to?
(a) Numbers.
(b) Symbols.
(c) 0s and 1s.
(d) Its basic elements.

Short Answer Questions

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

2. How was the telephone superior to the telegraph?

3. What caused the errors that were contained in the tables of logarithms that had to be calculated themselves?

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

5. What was difficult for people to accept about telegraph communications?

(see the answer keys)

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