Television Vocabulary

Vocabulary

Click on any of the vocabulary words below to hear them pronounced and used in a sentence.    fiber-optic  Definition: Relating to thin transparent fibers of glass or plastic that are enclosed by material of a lower index of refraction and that transmit light throughout their length by internal reflections. Context: The signal will be captured and temporarily be converted into laser light and fed down long strands of glass called fiber-optic lines.    bit  Definition: A unit of computer information equivalent to the result of a choice between two alternatives (e.g., yes or no, on or off). Context: A television camera breaks the scene into bits and scans the world a bit at a time.    vacuum tubes  Definition: An electron tube evacuated to a high degree of vacuum. Context: For the next 60 years, television cameras used vacuum tubes.    prism  Definition: A transparent body that is bounded in part by two nonparallel plane faces and is used to refract or disperse a beam of light. Context: In broadcast color cameras, the light streaming through the lens enters a prism, which does the usual prism thing, splitting the light into three colors.    ray gun  Definition: A device which fires a stream of electrons toward a fluorescent screen. The direction of the stream is controlled by a magnetic field within a cathode ray tube (the point of origin for the stream). Context: There is a ray gun at the back of the picture tube firing a thin beam to light up a tiny dot on your screen.    record head  Definition: An electromagnetic strip device which imparts a characteristic pattern on a storage medium such as magnetic tape, thereby saving information to the storage medium. Context: All magnetic recording begins with an electromagnet called a record head.    segmentation  Definition: The process of dividing into segments. Context: He could get rid of segmentation by a nice long scan with a tape wrapped around this big drum.    analog  Definition: Relating to a mechanism in which data is represented by continuously variable physical quantities (such as voltages). Context: We live in an analog world.    digital  Definition: Relating to data in the form of numerical digits. Context: To make our analog world digital it must be converted.    agent  Definition: One who is authorized to act for or in the place of another. Context: And these days you use the word agents to do that.    Intelligence Search Software  Definition: Computer instructions, customized to the preferences of an individual. Context: And the term agent refers to Intelligence Search Software that will be programmed to know what each family member likes.