Computers and screens Lesson 36 of the technology course of Mova's primary school: 20 sentences, each with its syntax tree and pragmatics. The lessons are written for Mova, and their agreed trees are part of Mova corpus 0.4 (CC BY-SA 4.0). How Mova does on its tests: the lesson at school .
0 A computer is not clever the way you are; it is incredibly fast and incredibly obedient. 1 Its processor follows a list of exact instructions, called a program, doing billions of tiny steps every second, like a cook who reads a recipe one line at a time at lightning speed. 2 Inside, everything is stored as ones and zeros, like millions of tiny switches that are either on or off. 3 A photo, a song and your game save are all just very long rows of ones and zeros that the program knows how to read. 4 The screen shows the results with millions of tiny dots called pixels. 5 Each pixel has a red, a green and a blue part that glow a little or a lot, and mixing those three makes every colour you see, from a yellow banana to a purple dragon. 6 All that work makes the chips hot, so a fan blows air over metal fins, which is why a laptop roars during a big game. 7 And a password keeps your stuff yours: long, secret, and shared with no one except your parents. 8 A computer has a processor that follows instructions very fast, memory that holds what it is working on and storage that keeps files when it is switched off; a modern processor does billions of simple steps every second. 9 Computers store everything, every photo, song and game, as ones and zeros, called binary, like switches that are on or off. 10 A computer program is a list of exact instructions written by programmers in a language the computer can follow; Ada Lovelace, in the 1840s, is often called the first computer programmer. 11 An optical mouse has a light and a tiny camera underneath that take pictures of the desk many times a second to work out how it moved, so on clear glass with no pattern to see it gets lost; the first mouse, in the 1960s, was made of wood. 12 A screen is made of millions of tiny dots called pixels, each with red, green and blue parts that light up in different amounts, and all three glowing brightly together look white; with a magnifying glass you can see them. 13 Take breaks from screens and look into the distance now and then to rest your eyes. 14 Chips get hot, so a fan blows air over metal fins to carry the heat away; never block the vents, and a laptop on a bed can overheat. 15 A games console is a powerful computer made for games, with a special graphics chip that draws the whole picture many times every second; take breaks and keep game time balanced. 16 An inkjet printer sprays tiny drops of ink, while a laser printer uses a laser to put powder on the paper and heat to fix it, which is why its pages come out warm. 17 The cloud is really other people's computers in big data centres, reached through the internet, and data centres use huge amounts of electricity and cooling. 18 A password is a secret that proves it is you, and computers store only a scrambled version of it; long phrases of random words can be stronger than short tricky ones. 19 Never share a password with anyone except your parents. ← previous Phones and how a call travelsnext → The internet and undersea cables↑ back to Technology This page in Markdown → https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/technology/36-computers-and-screens/