Test Your EQ
— Issue #145
Each month, Test Your EQ presents
some basic engineering problems for you to test
your Engineering Quotient. What's your EQ?
|
Problem 1—In the figure below, the J and K inputs
of all the flip-flops are held at logic high. What is
the frequency of the output signal if the clock is 10kHz?
Answer
Problem 2—What
key piece of information is missing from the CP/M filesystem?
Answer
Problem 3—In
nanotechnology, the basic gate is a 3 input "majority"
gate whose output is the majority of all the inputs as
shown below. How would you realize AND and OR boolean
functions using this gate?
Answer
Problem 4—The
original single-sided, single-density 8" floppy disk used
by CP/M uses what format, and what is its storage capacity?
Answer
Problem 5—
Would the following code work? If yes, what would be the
output?
#include <stdio.h>
main() {
int n=5, f=10;
printf ("\nn=%*d", f, n);
}
Answer
Problem 6—
What
does the circuit below do?
Answer
Problem 7—A
circular disc can rotate clockwise and back. Use minimum
hardware to build a circuit to indicate the direction
of rotation.
Answer
Problem 8—Suppose
you have some 3-bit data, say, grayscale values for which
000 = black and 111 = white. You have a display device
that takes 8-bit data, and you want to extend the bit
width of your data to match?
If you just pad the data with zeros, you get the value
11100000 for white, which is not full white for the 8-bit
display — that would be 11111111. What can you do?
Answer
Problem 9—The
following Perl subroutine is an example of what kind of
coding style?
# Argument list is a column number (negative values select
# columns from the right), followed by a list of strings
# containing :-delimited fields
# Returns the sorted list of strings
sub sortbycol {
my $n = shift;
map $_->[1],
sort {$a->[0] cmp $b->[0]}
map [(split /:/, $_)[$n], $_], @_;
}
Answer
Problem 10—This
Perl subroutine is an example of what other transform?
# Argument list is a list of strings to be sorted.
# Returns the list of strings sorted by their last words.
sub sortbylast {
map +(split ' ', $_, 2)[1],
sort
map +(split ' ')[-1] . ' ' . $_, @_;
}
Answer
Problem 11—What
is the purpose of the + signs in the previous question's
code?
Answer
Problem 12—Both
of these functions return a pointer to the string "Hello
World!":
char* functionA (void)
{
char temp[25];
strcpy (temp, "Hello World!");
return &temp;
}
char* functionB (void)
{
char* temp;
temp = (char *) malloc (25);
strcpy (temp, "Hello World!");
return temp;
}
Which
of these functions is robust and why ?
Answer
Published: August-2002
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