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

One of the favorite questions in the tests of teachers of schools and elementary courses of universities in informatics is "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 representation of the same type of data?", Let's find out what is at stake. Data (information) is a collection of knowledge about the world around us, which are the object of processing by computer systems. What are the types and forms of data representation?

• Sound. The very first form of data transmission on earth. These are the words, sounds that our environment emits to convey knowledge to us.
• Graphical. Rock paintings, children's drawings, graphics, drawings.
• Text. Having learned to draw, humanity has passed to a more complex form of information representation, having developed a special "code", which can be described by any object of the surrounding world.
• Numeric. The next step is to quantify the parameters of the object.
• Video information, which appeared in the late 19th century.

Conformity

As you can see, there are a lot of types of information. How briefly can the form of representation of the same type of data be called? If you think about it, it's hard to say unequivocally that there is such a method. On the one hand, all kinds of information, which we described above, are in themselves a form of transmission, with exactly the same type of data. On the other hand, figures or figures can be depicted in the figure, so what do the teachers and students demand from the students? Why does this question often cause a decrease in the students' score?

Answer

If to you on an examination the question: "the Form of representation of the same data" has caught, the only correct variant of the answer becomes - the table. Of course, this is strange enough, because in the cells of the table can be placed and formulas, and text, and drawings, and in some applications can be placed in a cell and a fragment of the video. So where is the truth? The fact is that in this case "single-type" means data that can be combined for a certain reason. That is, in the first column - the year of birth of a person, in the second - his surname. And it does not matter whether this information is written in letters, numbers, drawn or represented as an audio file. All data from the same column will carry the same meaning.