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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 device does Carr buy in 1990 that increases his ability to connect to the nascent Internet?
(a) A modem.
(b) An external hard drive.
(c) A cyber-optic cable connector.
(d) A Hypercard.

2. What else besides repeated physical actions can rewire the human brain?
(a) Direct exposure to bright sunlight.
(b) Herbs and spices.
(c) Purely mental activity.
(d) Having and walking a dog every day.

3. Where was Johannes Gutenberg born?
(a) Paris.
(b) Berlin.
(c) Mainz.
(d) Rome.

4. What does the Turning Test designed to measure?
(a) The strength of a code.
(b) A machine's ability to exhibit intelligent behavior that is equal to, or even indistinguishable from, a human's.
(c) Signal strength of transistors.
(d) The bandwith of fiber optic cables.

5. According to Carr, what did the widespread use of clocks do for civilization?
(a) Helped people stop missing appointments.
(b) Helped move societies from agrarian ones to more urban, higher-tech ones.
(c) Helped people maximize their productivity in terms of farming and harvesting food.
(d) Helped people keep Seasonal Affective Disorder in check.

Short Answer Questions

1. Who was the inventor of the typewriter?

2. In Chapter Three, what does Ong say that writing does for consciousness?

3. How does the brain's ability to adapt to changes shift as people age?

4. How does Carr say the Net differs most from much of the mass media it has displaced?

5. What did the psychologist Vaughan Bell saw the ability to focus on a single task represents in the history of psychological development?

Short Essay Questions

1. How does Carr describe Friedrich Nietzsche's feelings towards his first typewriter?

2. How does Carr describe intellectual technologies?

3. In Chapter Five, what is the most important difference Carr identifies between the Net and most of the mass media it replaces, like television?

4. What does Carr say about the relationship between the so-called "intellectual ethic" of a technology and its inventor (45)?

5. What invention did Lee de Forest create, and what technological advances did it allow for?

6. In Chapter Five, how does Carr describe the British mathematician Alan Turing?

7. How did the neuroscientist Michael Merzenich prove the brain was more changeable than was previously thought with his experiments in the 1960s?

8. How does attending Dartmouth College in the 1970s affect Carr's attitudes towards computers?

9. In Chapter Three, what does Carr identify as the format of some of the earliest Sumerian writing that archaeologists and historians have uncovered?

10. In Chapter Three, what does Carr identify as the philosopher Socrates' fear that widespread reading would replace?

(see the answer keys)

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