The study involved 2,392 men and women all of whom were 18 years or older. In the survey, people were presented with such words which included both technical and non technical terms. They had to choose one out of three options for the word which really carried the meaning for that word. But what actually happened that some of them were confused ,while some of them were confident at their wrong answers. An embarrassing amount of Americans think HTML is a disease you can catch from another human being–which says a lot about the state of both sex and computer education in the U.S. Other findings, unearthed by the Times:
First of all 77% of respondents could not tell what SEO stands for (SEO stands for Search Engine Optimisation,a technique used by website admins to promote their website on search engines) 27% said Gigabyte is an insect found in South America (Gigabyte is a unit for memory capacity). 23% of them thought mp3 as a “Star Wars Robot,” while mp3 is an audio file format. 18% identified “Blu-ray” as a marine animal (It is a disc format typically used to store high-definition videos). 42% said they believed a “motherboard” was “the deck of a cruise ship.” A motherboard is usually a circuit board that holds many of the key components of a computer. 5% said they believed “software” is comfortable clothing, while Software is a general term used for referring to a computer program. According to 12% of them,USB is an acronym for a European Country. (USB is acronym of Universal Serial Bus,A connectivity technology).
Despite the incorrect answers, 61% of the respondents said it is important to have a good knowledge of technology in this day and age. The origin and veracity of the survey had come under question by a journalism ethics website. The firm that conducted the survey, 10 Yetis Public Relations, later said that it stands by its work and had provided the full survey results. The survey is “100% genuine, and it’s a valid survey,” said Leanne Thomas, a senior account executive for 10 Yetis Public Relations. Thomas said the survey was conducted over email over the course of seven days. She said participants of the survey were given no incentive to respond.
