CMSC 131 Study Questions 1

Question 1

What does the acronym CVS stand for?

Answer 1

Concurrent Versioning System

Question 2

What does IDE stand for?

Answer 2

Integrated Development Environment

Question 3

What IDE will we use in class this semester?

Answer 3

Eclipse

Question 4

What does CPU stand for?

Answer 4

Central Processing Unit

Question 5

Define the term “bit”.

Answer 5

It’s an abstraction – a bit can be either 0 or 1

Question 6

Define the term “byte”.

Answer 6

A sequence of 8 bits.

Question 7

What is “hardware”? Name some examples.

Answer 7

Physical components of the computer. (Things you can “touch”). Examples include: CPU, RAM chips, mother board, disk drives, monitor, mouse, keyboard, cables…

Question 8

What is “software”? Name some examples.

Answer 8

These are the “programs” that you can run on a computer. Examples: Internet browsers, games, word processors, spreadsheet programs, the operating system, etc.

Question 9

Name several different operating systems.

Answer 9

Some are: Windows (eg: XP/7/8), Mac OS X, Unix, Linux, Solaris…

Question 10

Give some examples of secondary memory devices.

Answer 10

Hard drives, floppy disks, flash memory devices, CD’s , DVD’s

Question 11

What is the advantage of primary memory over secondary?

Answer 11

It is typically much faster.

Question 12

What is the advantage of secondary memory over primary?

Answer 12

It is permanent. (Also usually there is more of it!)

Question 13

What does I/O stand for? Give some examples of I/O devices.

Answer 13

Input/Output. These are devices that allow you to communicate with the computer: monitor, keyboard, mouse, printer, etc.

Question 14

How many different combinations of 0’s and 1’s can be represented using 7 bits?

Answer 14

27 = 128

Question 15

How many bytes are in a kilobyte? Megabyte? Gigabyte?

Answer 15

210 = 1024Megabyte? 220Gigabyte? 230

Question 16

Name four things that the operating system does for you.

Answer 16

Any of:

• Process management
• Memory management
• Primitive I/O
• Windowing
• Primitive network control
• Security management

Question 17

What do you call the language that the CPU uses (0’s and 1’s represent instructions in this language).

Answer 17

machine language

Question 18

How does “assembly language” relate to your answer to the previous question?

Answer 18

Assembly language is a mnemonic representation of machine language.

Question 19

Name some higher level languages that were NOT designed for object oriented programming.

Answer 19

Fortran, Cobol, C, etc.

Question 20

Name some higher level languages that WERE designed for object oriented programming.

Answer 20

C++, Java, etc.

Question 21

Translate the number 123 into base 7 representation.

Answer 21

234 (base 7)

Question 22

Translate the binary (base 2) number 1011010 into base 10 representation.

Answer 22

90

Question 23

Translate the hexidecimal (base 16) number 7F into binary representation.

Answer 23

1111111

Question 24

When your Java program is compiled, what type of file is created? (Hint: It is NOT machine language.)

Answer 24

bytecode

Question 25

What does it mean for someone to say that a Java program is “portable”?

Answer 25

The same bytecode will run successfully on any platform (provided that the Java Virtual Machine (JVM) is available.)