Who is known as the father of the computer for designing the analytical engine?
- A.Alan Turing
- B.Charles Babbage
- C.John von Neumann
- D.Blaise Pascal
Correct answer
Explanation
The correct answer is B, Charles Babbage. Babbage designed the difference engine and then the analytical engine, a mechanical machine with a store, a mill and punched card input, which carried every idea of a modern general purpose computer, and he is therefore called the father of the computer. Option A is wrong because Alan Turing gave the theoretical model of computation known as the Turing machine and worked on codebreaking, a century later. Option C is wrong because John von Neumann described the stored program architecture that most computers still follow, but that came in the 1940s. Option D is wrong because Blaise Pascal built a mechanical adding machine, the Pascaline, in 1642, which could add and subtract but could not be programmed. Remember also that Ada Lovelace, who wrote an algorithm for the analytical engine, is called the first programmer.
Read the full article: Inventions and Inventors: Pairs, Years and Exam PYQs
Practice Questions
View allWhat did Wilhelm Conrad Roentgen discover?
- A.Conservation of electric charge
- B.Electric bulb
- C.X-Rays
- D.Thermodynamics
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Roentgen, a German physicist, noticed in 1895 that a screen in his darkened laboratory glowed while a covered discharge tube was running, and he named the unknown radiation X-rays.
Read the full explanation →Who is called the father of immunology?
- A.Robert Koch
- B.Louis Pasteur
- C.Edward Jenner
- D.Karl Landsteiner
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In 1796 Jenner showed that material from a cowpox sore protected a boy against smallpox, the first deliberate vaccination, and the word vaccine itself comes from vacca, the Latin for cow.
Read the full explanation →Which one of the following pairs is NOT correctly matched?
- A.Vitamin A - McCollum
- B.Vitamin B - McCollum
- C.Vitamin C - Albert Szent-Gyorgyi
- D.Vitamin D - Paul Muller
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Paul Hermann Muller is remembered for showing that DDT kills insects, work for which he received a Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine; vitamin D is associated with Edward Mellanby, who linked its absence to rickets, and with Adolf Windaus, who worked out its chemistry.
Read the full explanation →Who is credited with the invention of the telephone?
- A.Samuel Morse
- B.Alexander Graham Bell
- C.Guglielmo Marconi
- D.Thomas Alva Edison
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Bell received the patent for the telephone in 1876 and made the first call over a wire, carrying the human voice itself rather than a code.
Read the full explanation →Dynamite, whose inventor endowed a set of international prizes, was invented by:
- A.Alfred Nobel
- B.Rudolf Diesel
- C.Michael Faraday
- D.James Watt
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The Swedish chemist Alfred Nobel patented dynamite in 1867, a safe way of handling nitroglycerine, and the fortune he made from explosives endowed the Nobel Prizes, first awarded in 1901.
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