Read the selection, then answer the questions.
How strange that the checkout line - this unhappy place, this technological backwater - should have pioneered a symbol that has transformed not just the supermarket but mass retail worldwide. During the 25 years since its adoption, the bar code has blossomed by the thousands in every American household. It has found its way into refrigerators and kitchen cabinets, bookshelves and broom closets, bathrooms and bureaus. On just about any consumer good imaginable, the ubiquitous icon comes compulsory, as part of the purchase price.
Through its formidable database, the UPC has allowed such retail giants as K Mart and Staples, Wal-Mart and Office Depot to track customer buying habits worldwide and to adjust billions in inventory accordingly. Its use has expanded through the distribution and production chain to encompass wholesale shipments and raw materials. And it has spun off a multitude of other codes and a computerized identification movement in which human blood, overnight packages, dry cleaning, university students, anitdepressants and endangered animals are identified by a laser-driven scanner.
Twelve digits run across the bar code's bottom, topped by 29 light and 30 dark lines that render those digits into a laser-scannable computer language. The first digit defines broad categories: produce, health-related items, standard packaged foodstuffs. A nonprofit corporation called the Uniform Code Council (UCC) assigns a five-digit sequence to a given manufacturer such as the number "30000" for the Quaker Oats Company, while the manufacturer doles out subsequent five-digit units of UPC to identify different products and sizes. Thus the scanner will read "30000 06110" as a pound of Quaker's Cap'n Crunch cereal, or "30000 01020" as an 18 ounce container of Old Fashioned Quaker Oats. The final UPC digit ensures that each one of the passing items has in fact been correctly scanned.
Although the symbol would eventually become invisible in its omnipresence, one can certainly understand how shoppers during those first few months perceived that strange apparition on their cans of corn and cartons of milk - decipherable to a laser but not the human eye.