General Technology Trivia

1. What is the term for a hobbyist who uses dedicated equipment to play back recorded music at a level of quality not usually achieved by most consumer electronics?

From Quiz High End Audio: The Headphones Quiz

Answer: audiophile

Popular culture may portray audiophiles as elitist snobs who possess more money than good sense. This doesn't have to be the case. Anyone who wants to enjoy recorded music at the next level can do so. Options exist for most budgets, and the audiophile community is full of helpful individuals who are happy to offer advice to beginners. Yes, researching, acquiring, and configuring the equipment is a big part of it, but music is always at the core of the pursuit. Once you've heard your favorite song on a great system, discovering details and nuances of the music you never knew were there before, you'll most likely be hooked on the audio hobby, seeking and hopefully finding ecstasy. Listening with good gear can be a transcendent, intensely pleasurable sensory experience unlike anything else.

From Quiz From a Lump of Coal to a Jolt of Electricity

Answer: At least 50%

The Carboniferous Period lasted from about 359 to 299 million years ago. Coal is not homogeneous - it has no chemical formula per se. Coal was formed where plants grew. As they died they fell into swamp water. As new plants grew, some died and they too fell into the swamp waters. This cycle was repeated many times. The surface of the earth changed bringing dirt, rock and water. After millions of years many layers had formed. The weight, heat and pressure produced chemical and physical changes leaving rich carbon deposits, which became coal. Coal is defined as a "readily combustible rock containing more than 50% by weight of carbon". Coal also contains hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, ash and sulfur.

From Quiz Go Go Gadget Quiz!

Answer: breathalyzer

The Breathalyzer is the brand name for a gadget developed by inventor Robert Frank Borkenstein to help determine the blood alcohol content in a person's breath. Law enforcement uses this gadget as a test to determine an individual's breath alcohol concentration at the immediate time of testing to enforce the local drunk-driving laws.

From Quiz Top Ten Free iPhone Apps 2007-2012

Answer: Netflix

Netflix is an American company, which both rents out DVDs and allows users to instantly watch a selection of film. The latter is done primarily from a computer, but the app allows one to do it on an iPhone as well. This app is great for the kids on car trips!

From Quiz How Did We Ever Do Without Them?

Answer: To use as a calendar

Its other main purpose was to calculate astronomical positions mechanically, but it needed the functioning calendar to do so. When this device was first recovered from the Antikythere shipwreck at the beginning of the 20th century, it proved a puzzle for scientists to figure out for years. It's been described in the following fashion by Professor Michael Edmunds of Cardiff University as "...just extraordinary, the only thing of its kind. The design is beautiful, the astronomy is exactly right. The way the mechanics are designed just makes your jaw drop...in terms of historic and scarcity value, I have to regard this mechanism as being more valuable than the Mona Lisa". Such is this device's complexity and exactness, that it would be fourteen more centuries before anything matching its precision would be invented. It acted as a calendar, divided the sky into degrees, and could calculate the positions of the sun, moon, various stars and planets, at any time, simply by entering a date. How amazing is that?

From Quiz Radical Robots!

Answer: Leonardo da Vinci

The robot (although it was not called that at the time) was designed in the form of a knight using a coat of medieval armor. When da Vinci's drawings were found in the 1950s, his design was faithfully constructed, and proved to be fully functional.

From Quiz Ten Minutes Until Impact

Answer: Anthropomorphic test device

An anthropomorphic test device, or crash test dummy, simulates the human body in dimension, articulation and weight proportion. They contain devices that record data in simulated vehicle impacts. Recorded data can include deceleration rates, velocity of impact, movement of the body and crushing force.

From Quiz Injection Molding Bits and Bites

Answer: Residence Time

The longer your melted plastic sits in the barrel of your Injection Molding machine causes the plastic to degrade reducing its overall properties.

From Quiz The End of the World as We Know It

Answer: Battery

Luigi Galvani was an Italian physician and physicist. His work on frogs' legs led him to coin the term 'animal electricity', which he believed was intrinsic to all animals. Alessandro Volta disagreed with this principle and set out to prove that 'animal electricity' was actually a physical fact. The first battery Volta built was essentially an attempt to prove his theory and not Galvani's was correct. Volta coined the term 'galvanism' to describe a muscle contraction when an electric current was applied. Although the battery as we know it today is very different to the first 'Voltaic Pile', the development of the modern battery is a significant technological advance which has allows us to enjoy a huge number of modern conveniences.

From Quiz An Introduction to Nuclear Power

Answer: Fission

Fission involves using neutrons to "split" the nucleus of a heavy element, usually uranium, converting it to two or more lighter elements. In the process, a tiny amount of the element's mass is converted into energy. Fusion involves converting two hydrogen atoms into one of helium. Fusion produces a lot more energy than fission, but so far no one has found a way to control the process. Hydrogen bombs use fusion, but the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki employed fission.

From Quiz What's in my MP3 player?

Answer: MPEG Audio Layer 3

The MPEG standards define ways of compressing digital audio, so you can squeeze more songs into less space. MP3, by the way, is a "lossy" compression, which means that if you were to expand an MP3 song and compare it to the original, they wouldn't necessarily be identical. The differences are supposed to be inaudible, though, and the space savings are considerable.

From Quiz Inside a Coal-Fired Power Plant

Answer: 4 million tons of coal

The coal can be transported to the plant in various ways -- train, river barge and truck are popular solutions, depending on the plant's location -- but the sheer scale of the operation requires streamlined loading, unloading and storage procedures. Coal is by far the most expensive component of day-to-day running, and a lot of effort goes into working out where best to get it from, how much to transport at a time, and what exactly to do with it once it gets there.

From Quiz Lighting Up

Answer: Lux

The rate at which light is emitted by a lamp is the luminous flux, which is measured in lumens. The amount of luminous flux radiating in a particular direction is measured in candelas, and the illuminance is the amount of luminous flux falling on a given surface.

From Quiz GPS

Answer: Global Positioning System

To the US Department of Defense, which is responsible for maintaining the system of GPS satellites, GPS is known as NAVSTAR, for NAVigation Satellite Timing And Ranging.

From Quiz Satellites

Answer: apogee, perigee

As the moon moves farther and farther from the earth in an elliptical motion, its farthest distance from the earth is known as apogee. At its furthest point, the apogee may be over 400 000 km away. At its closest point, known as the perigee, the moon and earth may be as close as 350 000 km away.

From Quiz Laser Trivia

Answer: Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation

This term was coined in the 60's after the MASER - Microwave Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation.

From Quiz What Do You Know About Statics?

Answer: Objects analyzed are rigid bodies, meaning they do not deform

When studying statics, it is assumed that the objects being analyzed are rigid bodies. The deformation of the object while under the action of forces is not considered in statics, and is instead studied in a later course that builds on statics, typically called "strength of materials".

From Quiz Lasers

Answer: pumping

Before lasing can occur, the active media is "pumped". The process of raising the atoms in the active media from a lower energy state to a higher state is like pumping water up from a well.

From Quiz A Time for Timekeeping

Answer: latitude

Latitude -- the north-south position of a place on the globe -- is important because sunlight strikes the earth at different angles at different latitudes. Hence, the spacing between hours on a sundial must vary according to latitude, and a Boston sundial will not work in Miami. Nowadays, the relationship between the position of the sun and the time on the clock does depend on longitude as well, but this is only because time zones (introduced in the 19th century) have done away with the concept of true local time. It used to be that noon was always defined as the time when the sun was at its zenith, wherever you were, but markings on modern sundials have to take into account a location's east-west position within its time zone.

From Quiz Techie Terms

Answer: Disk Operating System & disc operating system&denial of service&denial of service attack

DOS is still used in legacy systems.

From Quiz General Technology

Answer: Steve Wozniak

From Quiz Technology:Our Future

Answer: terminal

Most electrodes are made of metal (ex. copper).

From Quiz School of Rocks

Answer: Cyanide

The Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) is a federal governmental agency in Australia charged with scientific research. The conventional method of gold extraction carries significant environmental, health, and safety risks, and certain regions have banned the use of cyanide following toxic chemical spills. CSIRO pioneered the cyanide-free technology called "Going for Gold" in the search for a more environmentally friendly method of gold recovery. The process presents an attractive option for mines looking to overcome regulatory and economic barriers, as well as those looking to upgrade to greener, more sustainable technology. This question deposited into the quiz by Phoenix Rising's JCSon, who is excited by the prospect of green gold.

From Quiz High End Audio: The Headphones Quiz

Answer: 44.1 kHz/16 bits

None of the other answer choices are used when creating digital audio. The engineers who designed the compact disc digital audio standard used 16 bits (a base ten number from zero to 65,535) to represent a voltage (sound volume level). They knew that if they measured the volume level in this way, 44,100 times per second, they could digitize sound in a way that was sufficiently accurate to convince most listeners under most conditions. This type of digitizing of analog data is known as pulse code modulation, or PCM. Any combination of sample rate and bit depth greater than 44.1/16 is considered "high resolution" audio. So if a certain number of samples and bits per sample is good, then more must be better, right? Well, there are limits. Bit depths greater than 24 are not practical, and when it comes to sample rates, sound scientists and electronic engineers continue to debate the "more is better" camp of digital audiophiles as to what is perceivable and desirable.

From Quiz Strange Magic

Answer: An electromagnet pumping out sound waves

Gone are the days when you had to hire a musician to hear music being played. From the end of the 20th century, people were using earphones to listen to music. Whether it was a portable cassette player or the latest iPhone, the earphones that came with them often worked in the same way. Each tiny speaker was made of a magnet and a coil of wire. When an electric current runs through the coil, it creates an electromagnet, which pushes out sound waves.

From Quiz Go Go Gadget Quiz!

Answer: walkman

The Sony Walkman, a portable audio cassette player gadget, was built in 1978 by engineer Nobutoshi Kihara for the Sony Corporation. The Sony Walkman was put on the market in Japan on July 1, 1979 and was made available in other countries beginning in 1980.

From Quiz If the Good Die Young, What Does That Make Us?

Answer: Record player

The record player, originally called the phonograph, was invented in 1877 by Thomas Edison. They were the standard for playing recorded music at home until use of the cassette player became widespread in the 1970s. Some people still prefer the analog, scratchy sound of vinyl records to that of digital playback systems like DVD or CD players. The recordings played on such a device consist of waveforms that are engraved onto a rotating cylinder or disc. As the cylinder or disc rotates, a stylus or needle traces the waveforms and vibrates to reproduce the recorded sound waves.

From Quiz How Did We Ever Do Without Them?

Answer: Automatic opening doors

To do this, he heated air in one chamber, which forced water in another chamber to move to a third section. As this water entered this last section, its weight lowered that section. Then, as it lowered, it pulled up ropes attached to doors - and voila, they opened. That's really incredible and it's a little like the same principle used to operate early steam engines - which were invented almost two thousand years later. Other inventions this hero came up with included an early vending machine; a wind-powered organ; mechanical sound effects for the theatres of the time; and, with visual beauty being very important in that era, an automatically operating fountain.

From Quiz Injection Molding Bits and Bites

Answer: They become linear aligned.

The faster you inject plastic the more linear your polymer strands become.

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Last Updated Apr 13 2024 5:44 AM

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