I have a question: These are pretty rudimentary questions and if you have a background in the literature, you could brush up in about an hour or two on most of this stuff (aside from memorizing the catalogue of data structures and algorithms you might find in a text book [which makes me wonder why he's focusing on these questions instead of an understanding of induction, space analysis for an arbitrary data structure, or general Big-O/Big-Omega analysis]), but why don't we actually come across uses for that sort of basic stuff all that often?

I mean, I don't know if what I do is all that specialist, but I spend a lot more time working out far less interesting things about how domain knowledge works than what sort of Data Structure or Algorithm is best for storing it and using it.