Quiz Category · Technology
Technology
Computing, the internet, gadgets, and innovation.
Quiz yourself on the people, products, and milestones that shape modern technology.
Technology as a quiz category covers four overlapping strands: computing fundamentals (hardware, operating systems, programming languages, networks), the history of the industry (the founding of major companies, the people behind landmark products, acquisitions and IPOs that changed market structure), the consumer internet and mobile era (search, social platforms, the smartphone, streaming, payments), and recent developments in artificial intelligence, cloud, and semiconductors. Easy rounds stay with names everyone recognises — the founder of Microsoft, the year the iPhone launched, what HTML stands for. Medium rounds expect knowledge of less obvious origins: which company built the first relational database, who coined a term that became standard usage, which CEO ran which firm during a particular decade. Hard rounds reach into the technical and the specific — the protocol behind a particular service, the architectural difference between two processor families, the year a programming language was released versus the year it became popular. The category is staple revision material for the science-and-technology section of UPSC and SSC current affairs, and a good ground for software engineers, students in CS programmes, and anyone whose work depends on technology they have never had to explain.
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10 questions per round24 technology questions with answers
Across easy, medium and hard · reveal each answer to check yourself-
01 What does HTML stand for? easy
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The correct answer is A. Hypertext Markup Language.
HyperText Markup Language. It describes structure — headings, links, lists — rather than appearance, which is CSS's job. Tim Berners-Lee wrote the first version around 1990.
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02 Who is the founder of Microsoft? easy
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The correct answer is B. Bill Gates.
Bill Gates, who co-founded it with Paul Allen in 1975. Allen is frequently left out of the question but was equally a founder, and named the company.
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03 What does 'HTTP' stand for? easy
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The correct answer is A. HyperText Transfer Protocol.
HyperText Transfer Protocol, the rules browsers and servers use to exchange pages. HTTPS is the same protocol wrapped in TLS encryption, which is why the S matters on any page you type a password into.
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04 What is the most popular programming language in 2024? easy
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The correct answer is B. Python.
Python tops most rankings, driven largely by data science and machine learning. 'Most popular' varies by what you count, though — job postings, GitHub activity and search volume produce different leaders.
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05 What company developed the iPhone? easy
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The correct answer is C. Apple.
Apple, launched in 2007. It shipped without an app store, copy and paste, or 3G — all arrived in later versions.
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06 What does 'CPU' stand for? easy
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The correct answer is A. Central Processing Unit.
Central Processing Unit, the general-purpose chip executing program instructions. Modern CPUs contain multiple cores, each able to work through instructions independently.
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07 What year was Google founded? easy
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The correct answer is B. 1998.
1998, by Larry Page and Sergey Brin while PhD students at Stanford. The name is a misspelling of googol, the number 1 followed by a hundred zeros.
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08 What is the main function of RAM? easy
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The correct answer is B. Short-term memory.
Fast, short-term working memory for data in active use. It is volatile — cut the power and the contents vanish — which is why unsaved work disappears in a crash.
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09 What is the name of the first computer virus? medium
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The correct answer is B. Creeper.
Creeper, written in 1971 as an experiment on ARPANET. It displayed a message rather than doing damage, and a follow-up program called Reaper was written to remove it — arguably the first antivirus.
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10 What does 'GPU' stand for? medium
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The correct answer is B. Graphics Processing Unit.
Graphics Processing Unit. Built to render graphics through thousands of simple parallel cores, that same architecture turned out to suit machine learning, which is why GPUs now drive AI training.
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11 Which programming language is known as the 'mother of all languages'? medium
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The correct answer is A. C.
C, developed by Dennis Ritchie in the early 1970s. C++, Java, C#, Go and countless others borrow its syntax, and most operating system kernels are still written in it.
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12 What is the maximum storage capacity of a CD? medium
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The correct answer is B. 700 MB.
About 700 MB, or roughly 80 minutes of audio. The length is often said to have been chosen so a particular recording of Beethoven's Ninth would fit on one disc.
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13 What year was the first iPhone released? medium
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The correct answer is C. 2007.
2007, announced in January and on sale in June. It was exclusive to a single carrier in each country at first, and had no third-party app store until 2008.
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14 What does 'SQL' stand for? medium
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The correct answer is A. Structured Query Language.
Structured Query Language, used to query and manipulate relational databases. It was originally called SEQUEL, renamed after a trademark conflict — which is why many people still pronounce it 'sequel'.
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15 What is the binary equivalent of decimal number 10? medium
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The correct answer is A. 1010.
1010. Reading right to left the places are 1, 2, 4, 8 — so 8 + 2 = 10, giving ones in the eights and twos positions.
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16 Which company created the Android operating system? medium
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The correct answer is C. Google.
Google, though it did not start there. Android Inc. was an independent startup that Google acquired in 2005, two years before the first Android phone shipped.
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17 What is the time complexity of QuickSort in the average case? hard
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The correct answer is B. O(n log n).
O(n log n) on average, but O(n²) in the worst case when pivots are chosen badly — a sorted array with a naive first-element pivot being the classic trap. Random or median-of-three pivots avoid it in practice.
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18 What is the maximum theoretical speed of USB 3.2 Gen 2x2? hard
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The correct answer is B. 20 Gbps.
20 Gbps, achieved by running two 10 Gbps lanes simultaneously. USB naming is notoriously confusing — the same standard has been renamed more than once, so cables rarely make their speed obvious.
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19 What is the difference between TCP and UDP? hard
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The correct answer is C. TCP ensures delivery.
TCP guarantees delivery and ordering by acknowledging packets and retransmitting losses. UDP does neither, which makes it faster and better suited to live video or games, where a late packet is worth less than a dropped one.
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20 What is the maximum number of IPv4 addresses? hard
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The correct answer is A. 2³².
2³², roughly 4.3 billion. That ran out, which is why NAT became ubiquitous and why IPv6 uses 128-bit addresses — enough to assign trillions to every square millimetre of Earth.
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21 What is the Halting Problem? hard
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The correct answer is B. An undecidable problem in computability theory.
The question of whether a program can determine, for any arbitrary program and input, whether that program will finish or run forever. Turing proved in 1936 that no such general algorithm can exist — it is undecidable.
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22 What does 'SOLID' stand for in object-oriented programming? hard
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The correct answer is B. Single responsibility, Open-closed, Liskov substitution, Interface segregation, Dependency inversion.
Single responsibility, Open-closed, Liskov substitution, Interface segregation, and Dependency inversion. Robert Martin gathered the five principles; Michael Feathers later arranged them into the acronym.
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23 What is the purpose of a blockchain's nonce? hard
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The correct answer is C. Vary the block hash until it meets the target.
It is an arbitrary number miners change repeatedly, rehashing the block each time, until the resulting hash falls below the network's target. Difficulty itself is set by the protocol — the nonce is simply what gets varied to satisfy it.
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24 What is the CAP theorem in distributed systems? hard
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The correct answer is B. Consistency, Availability, Partition tolerance.
Consistency, Availability and Partition tolerance — a distributed system can guarantee only two. Since network partitions happen whether you plan for them or not, the real choice is between consistency and availability during one.
The full technology pool runs to 300 questions — 100 questions per difficulty across easy, medium and hard. Each round you play is shuffled fresh, so the same ten never come up twice in a row. Pick a difficulty above to start a timed round, or scroll on for related categories.
Frequently asked questions
About the technology quiz- What does the technology quiz cover?
- Computing history, internet milestones, programming languages, major tech companies, mobile and consumer technology, and recent developments in AI and digital infrastructure.
- Are programming questions included?
- Some — at the level of general literacy (what year Python was released, which company created C++, what HTTP stands for). We don't test code or syntax.
- Are recent AI developments covered?
- Yes — major releases, well-known models, and the companies behind them appear at medium and hard levels.
- Is this useful for a tech-industry interview prep?
- Not directly — interview prep requires specific technical depth. This category builds general tech literacy, which is useful background but not a substitute for studying a particular language or framework.