VoucherCloud has carried out a survey to determine the importance of technology

Mar 6, 2014 12:02 GMT  ·  By

Although the Internet has become a common tool in the technology era we live in today, not all people are tech-savvy, but saying that HTML is a sexually transmitted disease is really far-fetched.

HTML (or HyperText Markup Language) is a programming language that’s used to make websites, but according to a new study conducted by discount and coupon site VoucherCloud and published by the Los Angeles Times, 11% of the Americans think HTML is actually a nasty STD.

The survey involved 2,392 people ages 18 or older who were asked to define some more recent technology terms and were given three possible answers to each question.

The study's aim was to determine how knowledgeable people were regarding tech-related terms and how important technology was for them.

“Technology is a huge interest for our user base, and month after month we see thousands of people visiting our site to look for coupons and deals to use when purchasing their favorite tech products,” Jessica Glaus of VoucherCloud said in a statement.

However, the study revealed that many Americans are not so well informed when it comes to technical jargon. When asked about HTML, 1 in 10 Americans said it was a sexually transmitted disease.

“It seems that quite a few of us need to brush up on our tech definitions,” VoucherCloud's spokesperson added.

Besides the embarrassing result related to the HTML notion, there were some other amusing findings. For example, almost a third of the respondents think a gigabyte is an insect.

Also, 42 per cent of the people surveyed said that motherboards are “the deck of a cruise ship,” while 23 per cent of them think that MP3 is a Star Wars robot.

Meanwhile, 18% of the respondents identified Blu-ray as a marine animal, when it's actually a disc format used to store high-definition videos, and 12% said USB is the acronym for a European country.

However, the term that confused the most people (77 per cent) was SEO, which means Search Engine Optimization.

“It’s perfectly understandable that a lot of people won’t know what SEO is, but it will be interesting to see how many more of these terms become more mainstream as tech continues to play a huge role in our lives,” Glaus added.

Nevertheless, we should look at these results from another perspective: if 11 percent of Americans think HTML is an STD, maybe the remaining 89 per cent know what it actually is.