Unit 5: Quiz 1 – Version B – Solutions

Biologists often attach tracking collars to wild animals. For each animal, the following geolocation data is collected at frequent intervals:

- Time

- Date

- Location of the animals

Which of the following questions about a particular animal could NOT be answered using only the data collected from the tracking collars?

• Approximately how many miles did the animal travel in one week?

• Does the animal travel in groups with other tracked animals?

• Do the movement patterns of the animal vary according to the weather?

• n what geographic location does the animal typically travel?

A garage runs a courtesy car scheme, where customers whose cars are being worked on can, if they wish, borrow a car to use until theirs is ready. Each time a courtesy car is borrowed and returned, the following information is collected on a form:

- Customer name

- Date/time car was borrowed

- Date/time car was returned

- License plate number of car borrowed

- License plate number of customer’s vehicle

At the end of each week the details from the forms submitted are typed into a database table, a sample of which is given.

Which of the following cannot be determined using only the data from the database?

• A. The average length for which customers borrowed a courtesy car from the garage.

• B. How many cars were being repaired in the garage on a given date.

• C. How many times a given customer used a courtesy car in a year.

• D. The day of the week on which most customers borrowed courtesy cars.

Which of the following would be considered examples of large datasets which require specific "big data" techniques for analysis?

• A music streaming service’s digital music catalogue.

• A personal digital password-protected file containing addresses of family and friends.

• The posts created in a single day on a popular social media website.

• The digital photos on a cell phone

Which of the following are examples of unstructured data?

• A video of a high school band’s music concert.

• Markets/Stock quotes in the business section of a major newspaper.

• A digitized collection of arrival records from the 1960s.

• A collection of photos documenting the changes in the appearance of a town district over time

An academic database contains millions of published research papers. The database has a tool which allows users to see the number of journals which contain certain terms. This data can be further filtered by the date of the publication, the journals containing the papers and the number of times the paper was cited. Which of the following questions is LEAST likely to be answerable using this tool.

• Were papers in the journal with "national" in the title more likely to be cited?

• On which subjects were the most papers published in 2010?

• Are more papers published in summer months or winter months?

• Which author published the most papers on a given subject?