Americans may consider themselves a pretty tech-savvy bunch, but a survey conducted by Vouchercloud.net found some pretty disturbing misinterpretations of some commonly-used terms.
Some of the errors were forgivable, while others should have been known even by a Luddite. The most egregious mistake might have been made by the11 percent of Americans who thought the web code language HTML was actually a sexually transmitted disease, but there were quite a few more.
In this day and age when music downloads are the most common way to obtain music it seems hard to believe, but 23 percent thought MP3, the audio file, was the name of a Star Wars robot, probably C3PO, but possibly R2D2. Most likely many of these same people were part of the 15 percent who thought software was really comfortable clothing.
Somewhat more forgivable were the 18 percent who thought Blu-ray was some kind of sea creature instead of a video format, although with every video commercial mentioning Blu-ray this mistake is a little hard to swallow.
The next two are probably a case where the respondent was thoroughly familiar with the acronym, but really had no idea what it stood for. Gigabyte (GB) was identified by 23 percent as a South American insect instead of a measurement of a devices storage capacity. USB was thought to be the short way to describe an European country, perhaps the United States of Bavaria.
Then there were those answers that not many people would probably get correct. Most of the world does not live and die by having their information properly picked up by Google, so it is understandable that 77 percent of the respondents did not know that SEO stood for search engine optimization. The same could be said for the 42 percent who thought motherboard was the deck of a cruise ship instead of the main circuit board of a computer.
Even more embarrassingly, 61 percent said it is in important to have a good understanding of technology.
The survey was conducted among 2,300 people who were presented with multiple choice answers that included both tech and non-tech terminology, the company said in a statement.
