Question

During the late 1980s, working from his home in Boulder, Colorado, Zimmermann gradually pieced together his scrambling software package. His main goal was to speed up RSA encryption. Ordinarily, if Alice wants to use RSA to encrypt a message to Bob, she looks up his public key and then applies RSA's one-way function to the message. Conversely, Bob decrypts the ciphertext by using his private key to reverse RSA's one-way function. Both processes require considerable mathematical manipulation, so encryption and decryption can, if the message is long, take several minutes on a personal computer. If Alice is sending a hundred messages a day, she cannot afford to spend several minutes encrypting each one.

Which kinds of evidence are included in the excerpt? Select 3 options.

a statistic
an example
a quote
a hypothetical situation
a fact
the author’s personal story

Answer 1

- an example — the Alice-and-Bob description illustrates how RSA encryption works.
- a hypothetical situation — “If Alice is sending a hundred messages a day…” presents a what-if scenario.
- a fact — statements about Zimmermann working in Boulder and the time encryption takes are factual claims.