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The Internet and the World Wide Web: Question 1

Syllabus 5.1

Multiple choice 1 mark

A school's IT technician tells a new teacher: "If our broadband connection goes down, none of the school's web pages can be reached from here, but the pages themselves, and the servers that store them, are not affected; they are just unreachable from our building for now." The teacher replies, "So the pages themselves are what we call the internet, and the wires and routers that connect us to them are the World Wide Web?"

Which statement corrects the teacher's mistake?

Choose an answer to check it, then compare with the worked solution below.
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Worked solution

Step 1: Recall what each term actually means

  • The internet is the infrastructure: the physical network of interconnected devices, cables, routers and servers that carries data from one computer to another.
  • The World Wide Web is not physical infrastructure at all. It is the collection of websites and web pages that can be accessed using that infrastructure.

Step 2: Apply this to the technician’s description

The technician’s description is actually correct: when the broadband connection fails, the internet infrastructure connecting the school to the rest of the network is unavailable, so no web pages can be reached from the building. The pages and the servers that store them still exist elsewhere; they are simply unreachable for now.

The teacher’s mistake is swapping the two terms round: calling the pages themselves “the internet” and the connecting wires and routers “the World Wide Web”. This is the wrong way around.

Step 3: Rule out the distractors

  • Option B repeats the teacher’s swapped definitions, so it is also wrong.
  • Option C ignores that the syllabus deliberately distinguishes infrastructure (internet) from content (World Wide Web); they are not interchangeable terms.
  • Option D wrongly turns the distinction into one about geographical scale rather than about infrastructure versus content.

Final answer

The correct statement is option A: the internet is the infrastructure, and the World Wide Web is the collection of websites and pages carried over it.