Q 01/05

In 2021 the International Astronomical Union honored NASA programmer Annie Easley by giving her surname to what?

A) A main-belt asteroid

B) A crater on the Moon

C) A mountain range on Mars

D) A ring of Uranus

Answer · why

B) A crater on the Moon

A crater on the Moon, about five and a half miles wide, has carried the name Easley since February 2021. It lies in the southern hemisphere of the nea...

Q 02/05

A 1955 Cleveland newspaper story about which pair of NACA workers led Annie Easley to apply there the next day?

A) Two brothers

B) A married couple

C) Twin sisters

D) A father and son

Answer · why

C) Twin sisters

Twin sisters employed at the lab were the subject of the article, and Easley had never heard of NACA before she read it. Within two weeks she was on t...

Q 03/05

At NACA in 1955, what did the job title "computer" mean for new hires such as Annie Easley?

A) A teletype machine operator

B) A person calculating by hand

C) A wind-tunnel instrument reader

D) An engineer's typist

Answer · why

B) A person calculating by hand

A person calculating by hand is what the title meant: Easley solved engineers' problems with a desk calculator and printed tables of logarithms. The s...

Q 04/05

Which subject did Annie Easley study for two years at Xavier University in New Orleans before moving to Cleveland?

A) Chemistry

B) Dentistry

C) Accounting

D) Pharmacy

Answer · why

D) Pharmacy

Pharmacy appealed to her from about age sixteen, perhaps, she joked, because the corner drugstore sold the candy and ice cream. The only program near ...

Q 05/05

Which programming language, developed by IBM in the 1950s, did Annie Easley use to write code for NASA research?

A) COBOL

B) Autocode

C) Fortran

D) ALGOL

Answer · why

C) Fortran

Fortran was built for scientific number-crunching, and Easley picked it up as the lab's work moved onto mainframes. Her programs analyzed energy-conve...