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Systems Software & Architecture Final Exam Study Guide
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Questions in this quiz (90)
1A storage device consists of a read/write mechanism and a storage medium.
- ATrue
- BFalse
2Wait states increase CPU and computer system performance.
- ATrue
- BFalse
3Primary storage extends the limited capacity of CPU registers.
- ATrue
- BFalse
4The CPU moves data and instructions continually between registers and primary storage.
- ATrue
- BFalse
5With current technology, secondary storage speed is typically faster than primary storage speed.
- ATrue
- BFalse
6Block size is normally stated in bytes and is generally the same between storage devices, especially in a single storage device.
- ATrue
- BFalse
7512- and 4096-byte blocks are the most common data transfer units for magnetic disks.
- ATrue
- BFalse
8Volatility is a matter of degree and conditions.
- ATrue
- BFalse
9Magnetic tape and disk are considered volatile storage media.
- ATrue
- BFalse
10The physical structure of a storage device’s read/write mechanism and storage medium determines the ways in which data can be accessed.
- ATrue
- BFalse
11Serial access time depends on the current position of the read/write mechanism and the position of the target data item in the storage medium.
- ATrue
- BFalse
12Cost per unit decreases as an access method moves from serial to random to parallel.
- ATrue
- BFalse
13Secondary storage is generally expensive compared with primary storage.
- ATrue
- BFalse
14Capacitors can charge and discharge much faster than batteries.
- ATrue
- BFalse
15SRAM has higher density then DRAM.
- ATrue
- BFalse
16Electrical current can generate a magnetic field but a magnetic field cannot generate electricity.
- ATrue
- BFalse
17Disk drives share one set of read/write circuits among all read/write heads.
- ATrue
- BFalse
18HTH switching time is the most important component of access time.
- ATrue
- BFalse
19Because sequential access time is so much faster than average access time, disk performance is improved dramatically if related data is stored in sequential sectors.
- ATrue
- BFalse
20Communication channel capacity is generally a restriction on a single disk drive’s data transfer rate.
- ATrue
- BFalse
21Coercible material per sector is greater at the center than in the platter edge.
- ATrue
- BFalse
22To increase capacity per platter, disk manufacturers divide tracks into two or more zones and vary the sectors per track in each zone.
- ATrue
- BFalse
23Computing average access time is more complex when sectors are more densely packed on the platter’s outer portions because the assumption that an average access requires moving the read/write head over half the tracks is no longer valid.
- ATrue
- BFalse
24SSDs are much more tolerant to shock and other negative environmental factors commonly encountered with portable devices, such as multifunction cell phones, netbooks, and laptop computers.
- ATrue
- BFalse
25Magnetic disk drives have an advantage over SSDs in power consumption.
- ATrue
- BFalse
26Most optical storage media can retain data for decades because they aren’t subject to magnetic decay and leakage.
- ATrue
- BFalse
27Rewritable DVDs use a single standard adopted by the entire industry.
- ATrue
- BFalse
28Magnetic and optical storage are currently direct competitors.
- ATrue
- BFalse
29The write operation for recordable discs is destructive, so recordable disc formats can be written only one time.
- ATrue
- BFalse
30Magneto-optical technology peaked in the mid-1980s.
- ATrue
- BFalse
31A system bus connects computer system components, including the CPU, memory, storage, and I/O devices.
- ATrue
- BFalse
32A system bus can be conceptually or physically divided into specialized subsets, including the data, address, control, and power buses.
- ATrue
- BFalse
33With serial communication lines in a bus, each line carries only one bit value or signal at a time, and many lines are required to carry data, address, and control bits.
- ATrue
- BFalse
34Until the 2000s, system buses were always constructed with serial electrical lines.
- ATrue
- BFalse
35Serial channels in buses are more reliable than parallel channels at very high speeds.
- ATrue
- BFalse
36Performance is improved if storage and I/O devices can transmit data between themselves with explicit CPU involvement.
- ATrue
- BFalse
37Peer-to-peer bus protocols are substantially less complex but more expensive than master-slave bus protocols.
- ATrue
- BFalse
38The memory bus has a much higher data transfer rate than the system bus because of its shorter length, higher clock rate, and (in most computers) large number of parallel communication lines.
- ATrue
- BFalse
39Secondary storage devices are much faster than the system bus.
- ATrue
- BFalse
40Devices with low data transfer demand can use a single PCI bus lane, and devices with higher requirements can increase their available data transfer rate by using additional lanes.
- ATrue
- BFalse
41The CPU communicates with a peripheral device by moving data to or from an I/O port’s dedicated bus.
- ATrue
- BFalse
42A PC usually transmits data one bit at a time over a wireless connection, and a laser printer prints an entire page at once.
- ATrue
- BFalse
43A buffer for an I/O device is typically implemented on the sending computer.
- ATrue
- BFalse
44During a write operation, a cache acts similarly to a buffer.
- ATrue
- BFalse
45Data written to a cache during a write operation isn’t automatically removed from the cache after it’s written to the underlying storage device.
- ATrue
- BFalse
46One way to limit wait states is to use an SDRAM cache between the CPU and SRAM primary storage.
- ATrue
- BFalse
47Disk caching is common in modern computer systems, particularly in file and database servers.
- ATrue
- BFalse
48The OS is the best source of file access information because it updates information dynamically as it services file access requests.
- ATrue
- BFalse
49A full-featured 64-bit CPU, even one with multiple ALUs and pipelined processing, typically requires fewer than 50 million transistors.
- ATrue
- BFalse
50When multiple processors occupy a single motherboard, they share primary storage and a single system bus.
- ATrue
- BFalse
51Multiple-processor architecture is not common in workstations.
- ATrue
- BFalse
52Both multicore and multiple-processor architectures are examples of scaling up because they increase the power of a single computer system.
- ATrue
- BFalse
53Until the 1990s, scaling up was almost always a more cost-effective strategy to increase available computer power because communication between computers was extremely slow compared with communication between a single computer’s components.
- ATrue
- BFalse
54The largest computational problems, such as those encountered in modeling three-dimensional physical phenomena, can be solved by a single computer as long as it has enough computing resources.
- ATrue
- BFalse
55People routinely download megabytes or gigabytes of data via the Internet and store gigabytes of data on handheld devices, terabytes on desktop computers, and petabytes to exabytes in corporate and government data centers.
- ATrue
- BFalse
56Reducing the size of stored or transmitted data can improve performance whenever there’s a dearth of processing power.
- ATrue
- BFalse
57Zip files and archives are examples of lossless compression.
- ATrue
- BFalse
58Lossless compression ratios higher than 50:1 are difficult or impossible to achieve with audio and video data.
- ATrue
- BFalse
59Using data compression alters the balance of processor resources and communication or storage resources in a computer system.
- ATrue
- BFalse
60MP3 compresses the audio data stream by discarding information about masked sounds or representing them with fewer bits.
- ATrue
- BFalse
61For video display, a pixel displays no light or light of a specific color and intensity.
- ATrue
- BFalse
62Image quality improves as dots per inch increases.
- ATrue
- BFalse
63Image quality improves as pixel size increases.
- ATrue
- BFalse
64On paper, pixel size corresponds to the smallest drop of ink that can be placed accurately on the page.
- ATrue
- BFalse
65Decades ago, printers adopted 1/32 of an inch as a standard pixel size.
- ATrue
- BFalse
66For people and computers, a printed character must exactly match a specific pixel map to be recognizable.
- ATrue
- BFalse
67Point size refers to characters’ width.
- ATrue
- BFalse
68A monochrome display can display black, white, and many shades of gray in between, so it requires 8 bits per pixel.
- ATrue
- BFalse
69An IDL can represent image components as embedded fonts, vectors, curves and shapes, and embedded bitmaps.
- ATrue
- BFalse
70IDLs are a simple form of compression.
- ATrue
- BFalse
71LCD displays have less contrast than other flat panel displays because color filters reduce the total amount of light passing through the front of the panel.
- ATrue
- BFalse
72Phosphors emit colored light in liquid crystal displays.
- ATrue
- BFalse
73Because plasma displays actively generate colored light near the display surface, they’re brighter and have a wider viewing angle than LCDs.
- ATrue
- BFalse
74OLED displays combine many of the best features of LCD and plasma displays.
- ATrue
- BFalse
75Impact technology began with dot matrix printers.
- ATrue
- BFalse
76Color laser output uses four separate print generators.
- ATrue
- BFalse
77An advantage of optical over mechanical mice is a lack of moving parts that can be contaminated with dust and dirt.
- ATrue
- BFalse
78Bar-code readers are typically used to track large numbers of inventory items, as in grocery store inventory and checkout, package tracking, warehouse inventory control, and zip code routing for postal mail.
- ATrue
- BFalse
79Modern bar codes encode data in three dimensions.
- ATrue
- BFalse
80Character and text recognition is most accurate when text is printed in a single font and style, with all text oriented in the same direction on the page.
- ATrue
- BFalse
81Error rates of 1-2% are common using OCR software with mixed-font text and even higher with handwritten text.
- ATrue
- BFalse
82A digital still camera captures and stores one image at a time.
- ATrue
- BFalse
83Moving image quality improves as the number of frames per second (fps) decreases.
- ATrue
- BFalse
84Typically, digital cameras capture 14 to 20 fps.
- ATrue
- BFalse
85Most portable data capture devices combine a keyboard, mark or bar-code scanner, and wireless connection to a wired base station, cash register, or computer system.
- ATrue
- BFalse
86For sound reproduction that sounds natural to people, frequencies between 20 Hz and 20 KHz must be sampled at least 96,000 times per second.
- ATrue
- BFalse
87Sound varies by frequency (pitch) and intensity (loudness).
- ATrue
- BFalse
88Continuous speech is a series of nonstop interconnected phonemes.
- ATrue
- BFalse
89Phonemes sound similar when voiced repetitively by the same person.
- ATrue
- BFalse
90A significant advantage of MIDI is its compact storage format.
- ATrue
- BFalse
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- Quiz on Systems Software & Architecture Final Exam Study Guide, created by TouChee Moua on 30/11/2021.
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- TouChee Moua
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- English
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