As you walk down down the road to you CCNA certification, Make sure to put your ice-cream cone in the strategicall placed fridges along your route to stop it from melting.  If you graduated long enough ago you will recognize this as a story made to explain repeaters.  This story was obviously created using the squirrel and acid laced birdseed method.  It began as a joke in the sixties.  Hippies, tired of squirrels eating the birdseed the put out to attract birds (At times even when theis vans were on the freeway, Squirrels are stubborn.)  One day a friend of a parent's, friend's, cousin's, former college roomate's brother decided that a tripping squirrel might be funny to see.  everything went the way it was supposed to, until the squirrel escaped and became a part of a board meeting at A major company and designed a multi-million dollar product.  Since then it has been a widely used method for making major decisions in the business world.  But I digress,  This is where I explain different devices in non-tripping ways.

Repeaters

    Repeaters are layer one devices.  Their job is simple and monotomous, they take a signal and strengthen it.  Then they send it on.
 

Hubs

    Layer one, very much like switches.  In fact, they are multi port switches.  They do the same job, but instead of sendiong it in one direction they send the signal out of every port.

Bridge

    It filters traffic using MAC addresses.  Useful device, stupid name.

Switches

    Layer 2 device, uses MAC addresses to decisions concerning where to send a packet.  Some call it a dork others a multi port bridge.  No one cares.

NIC

    This is where you might be lucky enough to find the fabled MZC address, most of the time however it has a MAC address.  It enjoys wakls on the beach starry nights, and providing ports to plug into a network.

Router

    The router, the greatest of all network devices.  Worshiped by millions in the international church of the router.  Uses level three addresses to make routing decisions.
 

    Go forth young cisco student and make good use of the knowledge about routing devices I have bestowed upon you.  Or go to a kegger* and crash your car off a bridge, both are good options.  Either way you probably didn't read this.
 

* This site in no way encourages or takes part in the consumption of large amounts of alcholic beverages and noes not condone DUI.