Disks, Folders & Files

	Spring International
	Language Center

Disks, Folders & Files - Practice Quiz

Created by Tom Rohrbach, Spring International Language Center

This is a practice quiz to teach you about disks, folders and files. Read each question, then click the answer you think is correct. If your answer is wrong, try again. The quiz is designed to help you learn as you go. Good luck!

1. Windows is organized like a desk. It has a desktop, which you see when your computer is turned on. It also has filing cabinets, where you store everything. A computer 'filing cabinet' is a

2. There are many kinds of disks: floppy disks, flash drives, hard disks, CD-Rs, DVDs, and more. The little 3½ inch disk that people have used for years is called a

3. EVERY disk - any kind! - is organized like a filing cabinet. In DOS and Windows 3.1, the disk itself was called a directory, and you could put other directories inside it. In Windows 98, XP, etc., a directory is called a

4. In the old DOS / Windows 3.1 system, a disk was given a letter and followed by a colon ":". This system is still used. Your floppy disk is always "A:" and the computer's main hard disk is always

5. As you can see from the picture above, Windows still uses the 'old' system of drive letters (from A to Z). The main folder of a disk is the disk name followed by a Backslash, like "C:\". Every folder inside the disk is followed by another Backslash. If a file named "Mine" is in the "Program Files" folder, it would be shown as

6. To keep important files safe, and to organize things, Bill Gates and friends created "Extensions". In DOS, file names could only be up to 8 characters (letters, numbers, etc.), then a "dot" was added along with 1-3 more characters. Important files have special "Extensions", like EXE, DLL, INI, SYS, etc. You may not use these for your own files. This 'old' DOS rule is called the

7. Probably the most common Extension in Windows is DOC, like "C:\Files\Mine.doc". A "doc" is a document (writing) file for which program?

8. Many programs, especially word-processing programs (writing), save an 'old' copy of a file when you save the same file a second or third time. These 'old' versions of files are only for emergencies. Don't open them! They are called "BACKUP" files. Common Extensions for these files are

9. There are several common, and important, file Extensions used on the Internet. You should be familiar with these. An Internet or Web page will usually have one of these extensions:

10. Pictures (or "graphics") on the Internet can have several different Extensions, for example BMP, PCD, PIC, or TIF. But the two most common are GIF and JPG. Which is a better quality kind of picture?

11. If you want to save writing so anyone anywhere can read it on their computer, an easy way to save it is as a "text file". This kind of file does not keep fancy things like fonts, bold or italic text, etc. It just saves the writing. The extension is

12. It's important to understand SIZE when using files. For example, a floppy disk will not hold even one big picture file, but it can hold all the writing class papers you write at Spring in levels One through Six! One small piece of information in a file is called a

13. File sizes are usually in bytes, kilobytes (K or KB), or megabytes (MB). A kilobyte is 2¹⁰ bytes, or 1,024 bytes of information. In the example above, the file MOUSE2 is very small - only 127 bytes. A megabyte is large, 2²⁰, or 1,048,576 bytes. So, a megabyte is about ___ bytes.

14. In the example above, we say the new Windows MediaPlayer file (MPFULL.EXE) is 3,596,784 bytes, or about 3.4

15. A floppy disk holds about 1.4 megabytes. A CD-Rom can hold over 600 megabytes. A hard disk on a new computer will usually hold 40 to 120

16. A gigabyte is about

You're finished. You can do this practice quiz as many times as you wish. If there is something you still don't understand, ask another student or your teacher. When you're ready, go on to another quiz. Good luck!

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