Final answer:
A human might realistically perform up to about 10^9 floating-point operations in a lifetime, which falls under the category of billions. Supercomputers, however, can handle this amount of operations in roughly 10 nanoseconds.
Step-by-step explanation:
Estimation of Maximum Floating-Point Operations in a Lifetime
To estimate the maximum number of floating-point operations a human being could perform in a lifetime, we can assume one operation per second as a reasonable benchmark. Given an average human lifespan of approximately 80 years, and considering that there are about 31,536,000 seconds in a year, the total operations would be 31,536,000 seconds/year * 80 years = 2.52 * 109 operations. However, humans need to sleep, rest, and perform activities other than calculations, so the actual number is much smaller. Therefore, a more realistic estimate for a very dedicated human might be around 109, which aligns with the given options, where the most fitting choice would be in the billions of operations, option (a).
For a supercomputer, doing this number of operations is almost instantaneous. Supercomputers can perform at a rate of 1022 floating-point operations in a day. Thus, the time for a supercomputer to perform the same number of operations that a human could do in a lifetime is roughly (109) (10-17 s) = 10-8s, or about 10 ns.