Reading the exhibit

Why two questions in five carry an exhibit

On the Final Weighted Exam, at least 40% of every paper puts an exhibit above the question, about 24 of the 60: a show output, a capture, a topology, a protocol ladder or a table. That is deliberate. Reading evidence is what a network engineer does all day, so a paper that only asked for definitions would test the wrong skill.

An exhibit question takes longer than a plain one, so budget one and a half to two minutes for it. Most of that time goes into finding the right line. Practised readers are not faster at reading; they know where to look, and they stop reading once they have found it.

Every show output in the exam and in this chapter is printed by the NetForge simulator, in the format real equipment uses. Any exhibit you are unsure of can be rebuilt in the lab, where you can run the same command yourself.

The method: question first, one line, ignore the rest

Read the question before the exhibit. The stem tells you what you are looking for: a next hop, a port's role, the address a server sees. Without it, a twenty-line output is twenty equally interesting lines, and you read them all.

• Read the stem and name the one thing it asks about: a destination, a port, a VLAN, a host.
• Find the line in the exhibit that answers it. Each section below names that line for one output.
• Read that line's columns from left to right, in the order the output prints them.
• Decide what the device will do before you look at the options.
• Then eliminate. Most wrong options are a misreading of that same line: a swapped column, the wrong section, or a role read from the wrong side.