What does it mean to “upload” and “download”?
These both refer to copying files from the internet to your local machine and vice versa. As you may or may not know, the internet is just a world-wide collection of computers – web pages are simply shared files stored on the harddrives of these machines. Anyway, to “download” a file is to copy it from a machine on the ‘internet’ to your machine – when you go to a web page you are ‘downloading’ the information required to display that web page to your machine. An “upload” is when you copy a file from your machine to a server on the internet – this is less common – for example, when you are “uploading” your CV to a job site, or attaching a file to an e-mail on Hotmail (or other web-based e-mail systems), or if you are ‘uploading’ your own web page to a internet server so other people can ‘download’ it.
