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Last Week's Quiz

Created by Danielle Ownbey
Edited by Jonpaul Guinn

Read This First

  • Submit your answers by 7:43pm ET 12/8/25
  • Don't cheat. Cheating is bad. Using Google IS cheating.
  • Trivia graders don't care about spelling (but try your hardest)
  • No negative points for incorrect responses (so guess to your heart's content)
  • Email [email protected] for clarification on any questions

December 2nd is World Computer Literacy Day! The techy holiday was launched by Indian computer company NIIT in 2001 to create awareness and drive digital literacy in underserved communities worldwide.



Part of the reason that it’s hard to become computer literate is that there are so many terms with origins far removed from the information age.

Let’s test your skills by seeing if you can identify these terms based on their origin story!

SCIENCE & TECH Q1. Spider Structures: They used to just be for spiders. Then Tim Berners-Lee came along and spun one big enough to ensnare the whole world. What term did he coin to suggest a decentralized structure of links able to be accessed globally?



SCIENCE & TECH Q2. Rodent Resemblance: In 1965, Bill English thought his handheld computer navigation device resembled a certain type of rodent. Before everything went wireless, the cord helped to complete the impression. What animal gave its name to this essential tech tool?



SCIENCE & TECH Q3. Monty's Meat: What canned meat product gave its name to our email inbox’s least tasty content, thanks to a Monty Python sketch where Vikings chant it so much that it drowns out conversation?



SCIENCE & TECH Q4. Numerical Names: 1 followed by 100 zeroes is a really big number. It’s so big that what company set on organizing the largest amount of information in human history used a misspelling as its name?



SCIENCE & TECH Q5. Basic Blends: Originally used to refer to a small amount of something, what word now describes a fundamental unit of digital information? A blend of “binary” and “digit,” Claude Shannon popularized it in 1948 though it was first coined by John Tukey at Bell Labs a year earlier.



SCIENCE & TECH Q6. Greek Gifts: One minute you think you’re downloading legitimate software, and the next you discover that it was actually a malicious program in disguise. What equine name for this type of malware comes from a similarly insidious Greek gift?



SCIENCE & TECH Q7. Kardach's King: While developing short-range wireless tech, Jim Kardach found inspiration in the uniting of the Danish peoples for his efforts to bring together phones and computers. Named after a blueberry-loving Viking king, what communication protocol still bears that king’s runic initials in its logo?



SCIENCE & TECH Q8. Imagined Internet: In 1996, engineers at Compaq - not Cirrus Logic - were trying to visualize what a world of distributed networks would look like, so they drew what simple image that has stuck as our preferred method for describing this concept?



SCIENCE & TECH Q9. Self Starting: Referring to the process of a computer starting, what tech term comes from a very well-worn adage about self-reliance?



SCIENCE & TECH Q10. Seuss Stories: If you exact revenge on your competitors by achieving a perfect score on this quiz, you’re probably a computer…aficionado. Or perhaps you prefer what four-letter word first found in print in Dr. Seuss’s 1950 book, "If I Ran the Zoo?”



TIEBREAKER Connection Census: Owning a smartphone would go a long way toward increasing your computer literacy! According to Pew as of June 2024, what percentage of U.S. adults own one?

Quiz is closed and your answers are now locked! Graders are grading and results will be sent on 12/8/25