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Answer:

The processor.


Electronic Operations of a Processor

When a program is running on a computer the processor is constantly performing very many tiny electronic operations. For example, one such operation reads one byte of data from main memory into the processor. Another operation tests if one of the bits in a byte is a 1 bit or a 0 bit. Most processors are able to perform several thousand types of tiny operations like these, and can perform billions of them per second.

Those are the only things that a processor can do. It has a set of tiny electronic operations that it can to perform, and that is all. These tiny electronic operations are performed one at a time. But billions of them are performed per second, and billions of small operations can add up to a large and useful action.

Everything that a processor does is built out of these tiny operations! Luckily, you don't need to know the details of these operations to write programs in Java. The purpose of a high-level language like Java is to organize the tiny electronic operations into large, useful units represented by program statements.


QUESTION 2:

(Thought question:) When you click on a hyperlink on a Web page, your Web browser (a computer program) finds and displays a new page. About how many tiny electronic operations does the processor perform in doing this?