Samantha was calculating a mathematical formula on an electronic spreadsheet. she used multiple values to recalculate the formula. where will the cpu store data for easy access and quick retrieval during these computations? read-only memory random-access memory hard disk compact disk

Random access memory. This problem requires you to know what the different types of memory are and their relative advantages and disadvantages. Let's look at them and see why 3 are wrong and one is correct. read-only memory: Otherwise known as ROM, this type of memory stores code that can't be over written. Used frequently for constant lookup values and boot code. Since it can't be written to by normal programs, it can't hold temporary values for Samantha. So this is the wrong choice. random-access memory: Otherwise known as RAM, this type of memory is used to store temporary values and program code. It is quite fast to access and most the immediately required variables and program code is stored here. It can both be written to and read from. This is the correct answer. hard disk: This is permanent long term readable and writable memory. It will retain its contents even while powered off. But accessing it is slow. Where the contents of RAM can be accessed in nanoseconds, hard disk takes milliseconds to seconds to access (millions to billions of times slower than RAM). Because it's slow, this is not the correct answer. But it's likely that Samantha will save her spreadsheet to hard disk when she's finished working with it so she can retrieve the spreadsheet later to work on again. compact disk: This is sort of the ROM equivalent to the hard disk. The data stored on a compact disk can not be over written. One way of describing the storage on a compact disk is "Write Once, Read many times". In most cases it's even slower than the hard disk. But can be useful for archiving information or making backups of the data on your computer.