Conflicting meaning, between exam board / teaching resources, and technical meaning I will soon be teaching a lesson on ROM, RAM, and virtual memory.

The problem is with “virtual memory”: 

Some of the teaching resources correctly use the phrase virtual memory, and physical memory, and describe how virtual is mapped to physical via the memory management unit.

 from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_memory

The computer's operating system, using a combination of hardware and software, maps memory addresses used by a program, called virtual addresses, into physical addresses in computer memory. Main storage, as seen by a process or task, appears as a contiguous address space or collection of contiguous segments. The operating system manages virtual address spaces and the assignment of real memory to virtual memory. Address translation hardware in the CPU, often referred to as a memory management unit or MMU, automatically translates virtual addresses to physical addresses. Software within the operating system may extend these capabilities to provide a virtual address space that can exceed the capacity of real memory and thus reference more memory than is physically present in the computer.

While in other resources they use the phrase “virtual memory”, and describe “paging”. 


  Virtual memory is a section of volatile memory created temporarily on
  the storage drive. It is created when a computer is running many
  processes at once and RAM is running low.
  
  The operating system makes part of the storage drive available to use
  as RAM. Virtual memory is much slower than main memory because
  processing power is being taken up by moving data around, rather than
  just executing instructions. The guide on operating systems explains
  how the OS manages memory.


Taken from https://www.bbc.co.uk/education/guides/zmb9mp3/revision/8 Though I have seen the same in resources approved by the exam board.

So the question is what do I do in these situations?


The exam board is wrong, but clear about what they think the answer is.
The exam board is unclear about the answer.




Context:

UK England, GCSE / A-Level
You are seeing a difference between virtual memory as described to a computer user some number of years ago (this is more frequently called "swap" now), and virtual memory as understood by an operating system developer.

If one goes back and looks at, say... Mac OS System 7, one can see this description:


  Virtual memory adds more memory to your Macintosh by making use of unused free space on the hard drive. Because the extra memory comes from the hard drive, though, it is much slower than the RAM chips.


Or over in retro computing


  To avoid slow performance, Apple suggests that the amount of virtual memory you select be less than the system RAM.


This is the virtual memory as understood by a user.

Virtual memory as understood by a operating system designer and systems programmer deals with the virtual mapping of memory space used by a process to another space that is managed by the operating system.  It is not necessarily on a disk or any other medium.  It is not necessarily continuous in its physical addressing.