Tag: science & technology

Earth's equatorial radius is 6378.1 km, which is the distance from Earth's center to the equator. Earth is not a perfect sphere but an oblate spheroid, so the equatorial radius is larger than the polar radius of approximately 6357 km.

Yuri Gagarin became the first human in space on April 12, 1961, aboard the Soviet spacecraft Vostok 1. This historic mission occurred during the Space Race between the United States and Soviet Union, marking a major milestone in human space exploration.

The Empire State Building's height to its rooftop is 381 meters. When including the antenna, it reaches 443 meters. This Art Deco skyscraper was completed in 1931 and held the title of world's tallest building for over 40 years until 1972.

Isaac Newton was born in 1642, specifically on December 25th (Old Style calendar). This date is commonly cited as his birth year in historical records. The other options (1672, 1665, 1645) are incorrect and do not match documented birth records.

ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange) is the standard character encoding scheme for electronic communication between terminals and computers. It uses a 7-bit code to represent 128 characters, including letters, numbers, and control characters. BCD is for binary-coded decimal representation, BCDIC is IBM's punched card code, and Hollerith is an older punched card system.

CD audio players use laser beam technology to read the digital information stored on the compact disc. The laser reflects off the microscopic pits and lands on the disc surface, and the reflection pattern is converted to audio signals. This non-contact optical method is what distinguishes CDs from vinyl records that use needles.

ASCII was designed as an independent character encoding system, separate from earlier punched card codes like Hollerith. Unlike zone-based punched card codes, ASCII uses a straightforward 7-bit binary pattern for each character. ASCII can represent 128 characters, not 96, and doesn't use zone codes like those mentioned in option B.

Charles Babbage designed the Difference Engine in the 1820s-1840s as a mechanical calculator for computing polynomial functions. ENIAC was built in the 1940s, long after Babbage's time. The first electronic computer is generally considered to be ENIAC or Colossus, and punched cards were developed by Herman Hollerith.