People often can't answer these question today because the answers are now misleading or irrelevant, except to historians.
Even math has advanced in the last 100 years. Students today would be taught pertinent math, not how to use a slide rule. Throw a question asking for manipulations of a slide rule and 98% of today's students aren't going to be able to answer it. And most of those few who can are going to have a crotchety grandparent. The remaining few will be mathematical historians.
A while ago someone mentioned an old test from an American high school somewhere. One of the questions on that test was "name the organ responsible for purification of the blood".
This question is impossible to answer because there is no organ uniquely responsible for that. It's an important function served by several organs. Most prominently:
1. The kidneys are responsible for filtering certain toxins out of the bloodstream and ultimately getting them excreted in urine.
2. The liver is responsible for filtering other toxins out of the bloodstream and ultimately getting them excreted in urine.
3. The spleen is responsible for filtering defective blood out of the bloodstream and ultimately getting it excreted in feces. (Which is why feces is brown, incidentally.)
Without having attended a 19th-century anatomy class, there's no way for me to know what the person who wrote that test was hoping I would say. It seems pretty likely that I know more than he did, but that won't get me a good score on his test. Was that an easy question? Hard?
Not if you want peer acceptance and not be dismissed as a mere CS student.
It's acceptable to download your brilliance into something such as, say, CAYLEY/MAGMA [1], [2] but, obviously, once you start grinding the organ [3] and using it algorithmically for computation you're just another monkey . . .
Even math has advanced in the last 100 years. Students today would be taught pertinent math, not how to use a slide rule. Throw a question asking for manipulations of a slide rule and 98% of today's students aren't going to be able to answer it. And most of those few who can are going to have a crotchety grandparent. The remaining few will be mathematical historians.