Computer Awareness GK Questions with Answers – Page 16

In a web address the part before the colon and the two slashes names the protocol, so http, the HyperText Transfer Protocol, is the set of rules by which a browser asks a server for a page and the server answers.

The Transmission Control Protocol decides how data is exchanged across the internet and breaks a message into numbered packets that IP then carries to the destination.

HTTP, the HyperText Transfer Protocol, is the application-layer protocol a browser uses to ask a web server for a page and to receive the HTML, images and scripts that make it up.

HTML has no separate checkbox element at all. Every simple form control is written with the single input tag, and the type attribute decides what the browser draws, whether that is text, password, radio, checkbox, submit, file or hidden.

PPP is a data-link layer protocol that carries data directly between two nodes over a single link, such as a telephone line, a leased line or a serial cable.

Each hexadecimal digit stands for exactly four binary digits, so a two-digit hex number becomes an eight-bit binary number. Here C is 12 in decimal, which is 1100 in binary, and 6 is 0110.

Flash memory, ROM and a hard drive all keep their contents after the power is switched off, and that is exactly what non-volatile means.

Random Access Memory is the working memory in which the operating system, the running programs and the data in use are held, and everything in it is lost the moment the power supply stops, which is exactly what volatile means.

CMOS stands for complementary metal oxide semiconductor, and a small chip of that type on the motherboard stores the BIOS setup values such as the boot order, the date and the time.

Released by Intel in 1971, the 4004 put a complete central processing unit on a single chip for the first time in a commercial product and was a 4-bit processor, originally designed for a calculator.

Each address line can be either 0 or 1, so n address lines give two raised to the power n distinct combinations, and each combination is one memory address.

The address bus carries only the address of the memory location or the input-output port that the processor wants to use, and that address always travels outwards from the processor to memory, never back; a bus that carries signals in one direction only is unidirectional.

In 1945 John von Neumann described a design in which a computer's instructions and its data are both held in the same memory in the same binary form, so that the machine can be given a new task simply by loading a new program instead of being rewired.

The program counter, sometimes called the instruction pointer, always holds the memory address of the next instruction the processor will fetch, and it is incremented automatically as each instruction is taken up so that execution moves forward in order; a jump or branch instruction works simply by loading a new…

The ALU is the part of the processor that actually does the work on data: addition, subtraction, multiplication and division on the arithmetic side, and comparison along with the logical operations AND, OR and NOT on the logic side.

Cache is a small quantity of very fast static RAM placed between the processor and main memory to hold the instructions and data most likely to be needed next, and of the options given it has the shortest access time; only the registers inside the processor itself are faster.

Read Only Memory is the permanent or non-volatile memory of a computer: its contents are written once and survive when the power is switched off, which is why the BIOS firmware that starts the machine and runs the power-on self-test is stored in it.

A byte is made up of eight bits, so half a byte is four bits, and four bits together are called a nibble.

A microprocessor is named after the width of its data bus, that is, the number of bits it can carry in and out in a single operation.

TIFRAC, the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research Automatic Calculator, was the first computer designed and built within India; it was commissioned in 1960 and Jawaharlal Nehru gave it that name.