A teammate says: "CPU context switches take a few _____ — well below the threshold where users would notice." Which prefix fits?
Nanoseconds (ns = 10⁻⁹ s) is the typical scale for CPU-level operations like context switches and cache accesses. Milliseconds would be thousands of times slower. Picoseconds (10⁻¹² s) are used in physics, not typical IT contexts.
2 / 5
An engineer says: "Our data warehouse now holds roughly 4.5 _____ of raw event data." What prefix best fits a large storage scale?
Petabytes (PB = 10¹⁵ bytes) describes hyperscale data warehouses. Terabytes (TB) are more common for mid-size setups. Exabytes (EB) are reserved for the largest global systems like cloud providers or major internet archives.
3 / 5
A performance engineer says: "The new algorithm is three _____ faster than the old one — we went from 30 seconds to 30 milliseconds." What phrase completes this?
"Orders of magnitude" is the correct phrase for describing exponential scale differences. 30 s → 30 ms is a 1,000x improvement = three orders of magnitude (10³). "Times faster" is used for linear differences (e.g., 3× faster).
4 / 5
A storage engineer says: "The OS reports 1 GB but the disk shows 1 GiB — that's the difference between _____ and binary prefixes." What word fills the blank?
Decimal (SI) prefixes: 1 GB = 10⁹ bytes. Binary (IEC) prefixes: 1 GiB = 2³⁰ bytes ≈ 1.074 GB. The distinction matters for storage capacity claims and filesystem reporting.
5 / 5
A data engineer says: "We're ingesting on the order of _____ of events per day — roughly 50 million." Which phrase fits?
"Tens of millions" correctly describes the ~50 million scale. "On the order of X" is a common engineering phrase for approximate magnitude. It sets a scale without claiming exact precision.