Word Games and Ciphers

Education · 10 questions

Where playing with letters turns into mathematics.

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1. What is rearranging the letters of a word to make another called?

   1. A palindrome
   2. An acrostic
   3. A pangram
   4. An anagram
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   D) An anagram

2. What is the simple cipher that shifts every letter by a fixed amount?

   1. The Caesar cipher
   2. The Vigenere cipher
   3. The Enigma cipher
   4. Morse code
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   A) The Caesar cipher

3. Why is the Caesar cipher so easy to break?

   1. The key is extremely long
   2. The alphabet is too small
   3. Letter frequencies are preserved
   4. Messages are always short
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   C) Letter frequencies are preserved

4. What is it called when the first letters of lines spell a word?

   1. An anagram
   2. An acrostic
   3. A palindrome
   4. Alliteration
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   B) An acrostic

5. What was the name of the famous cipher machine broken in the Second World War?

   1. Colossus
   2. Bombe
   3. Lorenz
   4. Enigma
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   D) Enigma

6. What does public key cryptography make possible?

   1. Sending much shorter messages
   2. Communicating without secretly sharing a key
   3. Transmitting far more quickly
   4. Eliminating all errors
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   B) Communicating without secretly sharing a key

7. What is writing a text while avoiding one letter entirely called?

   1. A lipogram
   2. A pangram
   3. A palindrome
   4. An anagram
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   A) A lipogram

8. A pangram is a sentence containing every letter of the alphabet.

   1. True
   2. False
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   A) True

9. The security of a cipher should rest on keeping the method itself secret.

   1. True
   2. False
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   B) False

10. Morse code represents letters as dots and dashes.

    1. True
    2. False
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    A) True