Computer Awareness GK Questions with Answers – Page 29

In MS-Word 2016 the button marked 'Aa' in the Font group of the Home tab opens the Change Case menu, which rewrites the selected text without retyping it.

Ubuntu is a free, open-source operating system built on the Linux kernel and based on the Debian distribution. It was first released in 2004 by Canonical, and its name comes from a Nguni Bantu word of southern Africa meaning humanity towards others.

The device does two opposite jobs, and the name simply joins them. While sending, it modulates: it converts the digital signal of the computer into an analogue signal that an ordinary line can carry.

A line printer, such as a drum or chain printer, sets up and prints a whole line of characters at one stroke, so counting the lines it finishes in a minute is the natural measure of its speed.

A plotter takes a drawing that the computer has already prepared and puts it on paper with a moving pen, so data travels out of the machine and never into it.

It builds the image of a whole page on a photosensitive drum with a laser beam, then picks up dry toner on that image and fuses it onto the paper with heat and pressure.

A plotter holds a pen against the paper and moves it, so it draws continuous lines rather than building the image out of dots.

A plain scan is only a picture of the page, and nothing in it can be searched or corrected. OCR examines the shape of every character in that picture, matches it against the letters it knows and hands back real text that can be edited in a word processor.

Print quality depends on how many separate dots of ink or toner the printer can place in one inch of paper, so a printer working at a higher DPI produces smoother curves and crisper small text.

The word is a contraction of picture element. A screen image is a grid of these points, and the number of them across and down the screen is what is quoted as the resolution of the monitor, so a higher pixel count means a finer picture.

MICR stands for Magnetic Ink Character Recognition. The line of characters printed along the foot of a cheque is set in magnetic ink in the E-13B font, and the reader identifies each character from its magnetic signal, so the cheque is sorted correctly even when it has been folded, stamped…

Its print head carries a column of tiny pins that strike an inked ribbon against the paper, forming each character out of dots.

He built the first mouse, a small wooden box with a pair of wheels underneath, at the Stanford Research Institute, and the patent describes it as an X-Y position indicator for a display system.

A touchscreen accepts a finger tap or a stylus stroke as input and displays the result on the very same surface, so the one piece of hardware performs both jobs.

A chip of this kind has a small quartz window, and shining ultraviolet light through it clears the stored contents so the chip can be programmed again.

He set out the idea that a computer should keep its instructions in the same memory as its data, so that a program could be loaded and changed like any other information instead of being wired into the machine.

PARAM 8000 was unveiled in 1991 under the leadership of Vijay Bhatkar, and it made India one of the small group of countries building their own supercomputers.

The integrated circuit packs many transistors and other components onto a single silicon chip, and computers built on it were far smaller, cheaper and more reliable than their predecessors.

It fetches each instruction from memory, decodes it, and then issues signals that tell the other parts of the system what to do and when.

A bit is the smallest unit of data, holding a single binary 0 or 1. Four bits together form a nibble, which is exactly half a byte, and a nibble is convenient because it maps neatly to one hexadecimal digit.