Input and output devices

Question 1

What is a laser printer?

Answer 1

• Produce high quality hard copy outputs
• Use toner pressed on page to produce printed documents
• print large amount at a quick rate
• black/white/color

Question 2

What is inkjet printer?

Answer 2

• better than dot matrix printer but not as good as laser printer
• ink is stored and delivered to paper through ink cartridges

Question 3

Define dot-matrix printer

Answer 3

• Pins are pressed against an inked ribbon which produces an imprint on paper.
• slow, noisy, poor quality print out.

Question 4

Define OMR

Answer 4

Optical mark reader - interpret pencil marks on a piece of paper

Question 5

Pros and cons of OMR

Answer 5

• Input is faster and less expensive because there is no requirement to type the information
• Verification checks on the input are unlikely to carried out
• OMR must be printed very accurately

Question 6

Define OCR

Answer 6

Optical character recognition - the identification of printed or written text characters by a computer

Question 7

How OCR works?

Answer 7

Printed text is scanned and input to the computers which attempts to recognise the characters in it

Question 8

Pros and cons of OCR

Answer 8

• Text printed on paper can be converted to electronic form and edited.
• Character recognition is not always accurate and the electronic text has to be checked carefully

Question 9

Define MICR

Answer 9

Magnetic ink character recognition identifies data printed using a special magnetic ink

Question 10

Pros and cons of MICR

Answer 10

Forms can be pre-printed with data which can be read by a computer - saves time.

• MICR characters have to be printed in magnetic ink and this is more expensive
• Characters printed in ordinary ink is not detected.

Question 11

Define magnetic stripe card reader

Answer 11

Reads information from a magnetic stripe on the surface of a plastic card when it is swiped through the reader.

Question 12

Pros and cons of magnetic stripe card reader

Answer 12

• Often used as a form of identification that is small and light and can be carried all the times.
• The data recorded on the magnetic stripe can be affected by electromagnetic radiation and can be copied or edited.

Question 13

Define sensors

Answer 13

Used to input data about the environment into a computer

Question 14

Pros and cons of sensors

Answer 14

• Sensors can record data that people do not sense

- Sensors cannot interpret data

Question 15

What is the use of CPU?

Answer 15

It is the device that carries out software instructions

Question 16

Describe RAM

Answer 16

It temporarily stores the instructions that the computer is running, and the data it is processing

Question 17

Define cloud computing

Answer 17

Where users store their documents, programs and data on the Internet rather than their own computers

Question 18

Advantages of cloud

Answer 18

Lower cost: free programs
Time saving: no time to installing software
Sharing data

Question 19

Disadvantages of cloud

Answer 19

Security risks: data stored online is vulnerable to hackers and viruses
Decreased accessibility: no Internet, no access to documents and program