11% of Americans Think HTML is a Sexually Transmitted Disease and 27% say Gigabyte is an Insect

Using techie jargons with Americans may lead to confusion as the country blessed with Silicon Valley lags technically updated people according to a survey.

HTML is a Sexually Transmitted Disease(STD). Yes! you read it right, according to 11% Americans, Hypertext Markup Language(HTML) is an STD. This scenario was revealed when Vouchercloud a coupons website conducted a study which was later published by LA Times.

The study involved 2,392 men and women all of whom were 18 years or older. In the survey, people were presented with such words which included both technical and non technical terms. They had to choose one out of three options for the word which really carried the meaning for that word. But what actually happened that some of them were confused ,while some of them were confident at their wrong answers.

An embarrassing amount of Americans think HTML is a disease you can catch from another human being–which says a lot about the state of both sex and computer education in the U.S. Other findings, unearthed by the Times:

• First of all 77% of respondents could not tell what SEO stands for (SEO stands for Search Engine Optimisation,a technique used by website admins to promote their website on search engines)
• 27% said Gigabyte is an insect found in South America (Gigabyte is a unit for memory capacity).
• 23% of them thought mp3 as a “Star Wars Robot,” while mp3 is an audio file format.
• 18% identified “Blu-ray” as a marine animal (It is a disc format typically used to store high-definition videos).
• 42% said they believed a “motherboard” was “the deck of a cruise ship.” A motherboard is usually a circuit board that holds many of the key components of a computer.
• 5% said they believed “software” is comfortable clothing, while Software is a general term used for referring to a computer program.
• According to 12% of them,USB is an acronym for a European Country. (USB is acronym of Universal Serial Bus,A connectivity technology).

Despite the incorrect answers, 61% of the respondents said it is important to have a good knowledge of technology in this day and age.

“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,” a company spokeswoman said in a statement. “It seems that quite a few of us need to brush up on our tech definitions.”

The origin and veracity of the survey had come under question by a journalism ethics website. The firm that conducted the survey, 10 Yetis Public Relations, later said that it stands by its work and had provided the full survey results.

The survey is “100% genuine, and it’s a valid survey,” said Leanne Thomas, a senior account executive for 10 Yetis Public Relations.

Thomas said the survey was conducted over email over the course of seven days. She said participants of the survey were given no incentive to respond.