Final answer:
Items in a linear list are referenced by their index, which is an integer representing the position of an element within the list.
Step-by-step explanation:
Items in a linear list are not accessed directly; they are referenced by their index. In computer programming, an index is typically an integer used to specify the position of an element within the list. When you need to access an item in a linear data structure such as an array or a list, you would specify the index of the item rather than its actual value. For example, in an array consisting of the elements [5, 10, 15], the index of the element 10 would be 1 if we start counting indexes from 0.