What is the form of presentation of the same type of data? Types of information.

One of the favorite questions in the teststeachers of schools and elementary courses of universities in informatics - "What is the form of presentation of the same type of data? What forms do you know?". Unfortunately, in most cases they require a very specific answer, which is prescribed in the textbooks, but how much is it correct? Let's start from the very beginning to deal with this problem.

Definition

Before answering the question:"What is the form of presenting the same type of data?", Let's find out what is at stake. Data (information) is a set of knowledge about the world around us, which is the object of processing by computing systems. What are the types and forms of data presentation?

• Sonic. The very first form of data transmission on earth. These are the words, the sounds that our environment makes to convey knowledge to us.
• Graphic. Rock paintings, children's drawings, graphics, drawings.
• Textual. Having learned to draw, humanity has moved to a more complex form of presenting information, having developed a special "code" that can describe any object in the surrounding world.
• Numeric. The next step is to quantify the parameters of the object.
• Video information that appeared in the late 19th century.

Conformity

As you can see, the types of information are vast.How briefly can the form of presentation of the same type of data be called? If you think about it, it is difficult to say for sure that there is such a method. On the one hand, all the types of information that we have described above are in themselves a form of transmission, moreover, of the same type of data. On the other hand, the figure may contain numbers or text, so what do the teachers require from students and schoolchildren? Why does this question often cause a drop in students?

Answer

If you got a question on the exam:"The form of presentation of the same type of data", then the only correct answer would be - the table. Of course, this is quite strange, because formulas, text, and pictures can be placed in the cells of a table, and in some applications you can place video and a cell in a cell. So where is the truth? The fact is that in this case “of the same type” means data that can be combined according to a certain attribute. That is, in the first column - the year of birth of the person, in the second - his last name. It does not matter whether this information will be written in letters, numbers, drawn or presented in the form of an audio file. All data in one column will carry the same meaning.