Computer Awareness Mixed Quiz: Set 18

The correct answer is D, 11 points. A blank document in MS Word 2016 opens with the body font Calibri at a size of 11 points. A point is a printing unit equal to one seventy-second of an inch, so size here means the height of the type, and the setting can be seen in the Font group of the Home tab. The default can be changed for good by opening the Font dialog box, choosing the font and size wanted and clicking Set As Default, which stores it in the Normal template. A is wrong because 12 points with Times New Roman was the default of the older Word 2003 and earlier versions. B is wrong because 14 points is a heading size a user must apply. C is wrong because 10 points is smaller than the default and again has to be set by hand. Exam tip: Word 2016 opens with Calibri 11 point, Word 2003 with Times New Roman 12 point.

The correct answer is B, Datasheet. In a database such as Microsoft Access, the view that shows a table as rows and columns, looking like a spreadsheet grid, is called Datasheet view. Each row of that grid is one record and each column is one field, and the names along the top come from the field names set in Design view. Datasheet view lets you type data straight in, sort it, filter it and widen columns, while Design view is where the data type, field size and primary key are fixed. Queries and forms can also be opened in Datasheet view, so the name belongs to the display format, not to one object. Option A is wrong because a record is a single row of the grid, one complete entry, not the grid itself. Option C is wrong because a query is a saved question that pulls out selected rows; it is a database object. Option D is wrong because 'Tables' names the objects being displayed, while the question asks what the grid-like view is called. Exam tip: Access tables have two main views — Datasheet for data, Design for structure.

The correct answer is D, All of Above. An electronic spreadsheet such as Microsoft Excel or LibreOffice Calc can filter, merge and sort data, so all three belong to its work and no single one of them is the answer. A spreadsheet keeps data in a grid of rows and columns; the box where a row and a column meet is a cell, and a cell may hold a number, text or a formula. Its real strength is that a formula recalculates by itself the moment a figure it uses is changed, which is why spreadsheets are used for accounts, marksheets, salary statements and simple databases. Besides sorting and filtering it offers functions such as SUM, AVERAGE and COUNT, pivot tables, and charts drawn straight from the data. A is wrong because filtering, which hides rows that do not meet a condition, is only one of these jobs. B is wrong because merging cells is likewise only one. C is wrong because sorting, arranging rows by the order of a column, is one more. Exam tip: a spreadsheet file is a workbook and each page inside it is a worksheet.

The correct answer is C, Graphics. In multimedia, graphics is the broad word for every kind of visual element a computer can store and show, so drawings, photographs, movies and simulations all sit inside it. The usual list of multimedia elements is text, graphics, audio, video and animation, and in that list graphics covers both pictures made by hand on the screen and pictures captured from the real world. Graphics are stored either as bitmaps, made of pixels, as in a JPEG or BMP photograph, or as vectors, made of lines and curves described by equations, as in a drawing or a CAD file. A is wrong because animation is only one kind of visual, a sequence of frames shown fast enough to look like movement. B is wrong because an image is a single still picture, so it is narrower than the four things listed. D is wrong because text is made of characters and carries no picture. Exam tip: multimedia elements are text, graphics, audio, video and animation; bitmap graphics use pixels, vector graphics use equations.

The correct answer is A, 1930. It is the helpline on which a victim of online financial fraud should call at once, because a report made within the first hours lets banks and payment operators freeze the money before it is withdrawn; complaints can also be filed on the national cybercrime reporting portal. Option B is wrong because 1098 is Childline, the helpline for children in distress. Option C is wrong because 1800 is not a helpline at all but the prefix of toll free numbers in India, which run to ten or eleven digits. Option D is wrong because 1091 is the women's helpline. A related fact worth carrying is that the Indian Cyber Crime Coordination Centre under the Ministry of Home Affairs runs this reporting system, while CERT-In handles technical incidents.

The correct answer is A, B2C (Business to Consumer). In the business to consumer model a firm sells goods or services directly to the person who will use them, and Amazon's retail store is the best known example: a shopper opens the site or the app, puts an item in the cart and buys it, with no wholesaler or trader in between. Every e-commerce model is named in the same way, by who stands at each end of the deal, so learning the four pairs is enough to answer most questions on this topic. B is wrong because business to business means one firm selling to another, the way a parts maker supplies a car factory or IndiaMART links wholesalers. C is wrong because consumer to business is the reverse, where an individual offers a service to a company, as a freelance designer does on a bidding site. D is wrong because consumer to consumer is one individual selling to another, as on OLX or Quikr. Exam tip: B2C is Amazon retail, B2B is IndiaMART, C2C is OLX and C2B is freelancing sites.

The correct answer is C, MongoDB. MongoDB stores data as documents in a flexible, JSON-like form instead of as rows in tables with a fixed set of columns, and it is queried through its own interface rather than mainly through SQL, which makes it the standard example of a NoSQL database in exam papers. Option A is wrong because Oracle Database is the best known commercial relational system and uses SQL. Option B is wrong because MySQL is an open source relational database, now owned by Oracle, and the M of the LAMP stack. Option D is wrong because Microsoft SQL Server is Microsoft's relational database and works through Transact-SQL. The clue in such questions is the word table: relational systems force a fixed table structure, while NoSQL systems do not.

The correct answer is B, Meta Search Engine. A meta search engine keeps no index of its own. It hands the user's query to several other search engines at the same time, collects what they send back, removes repeated hits and shows one merged list. Because it borrows from many sources, a single search covers more of the web than any one engine would on its own. Dogpile and Startpage work in this way. A is wrong because advanced search only means the extra filters an ordinary engine offers, such as date, file type or exact phrase, while it still searches its own index. C is wrong because search tool is a loose term for any utility that finds files or text, not a defined class of engine. D is wrong because Boolean searching refers to using AND, OR and NOT inside one engine, not to querying other engines. Exam tip: meta means about, so a meta search engine searches the searchers.

The correct answer is B, FORTRAN. Its name is short for Formula Translation, it was developed by a team under John Backus at IBM and released in 1957, and it was the first language in which a programmer could write ordinary algebraic formulas instead of machine codes, which is why it is counted as the first high-level language; it is still used for heavy scientific and engineering computation. Option A is wrong because COBOL came two years later, in 1959, and was designed for business and commercial data processing, with Grace Hopper as the moving spirit behind it. Option C is wrong because BASIC was written in 1964 by John Kemeny and Thomas Kurtz to teach beginners, long after FORTRAN. Option D is wrong because Pascal was designed by Niklaus Wirth around 1970 to teach structured programming and is named after the mathematician Blaise Pascal. Keep the four years in order and this family of questions becomes easy.

The correct answer is A, HREF. The href attribute of the anchor tag carries the address the browser should open when the link is clicked, so href alone decides where a link leads. The text written between the opening and closing anchor tags is what the reader sees and clicks. The value of href can be a full web address, a path to another file on the same site, or a point inside the same page written after a hash. B is wrong because src supplies the source file for images, scripts and iframes, not for links. C is wrong because link is a separate element placed in the head section to attach stylesheets; it is not an attribute of the anchor tag. D is wrong because HYPERLINK is not an HTML attribute at all, it is the name of a spreadsheet function. Exam tip: remember the pair — href points a link somewhere, src pulls a file in.

The correct answer is A, .BAT. A batch file is a plain text file containing a series of commands that the operating system carries out one after another without any further instruction from the user, and it is saved with the extension .bat. Such files were the standard way of automating routine work on DOS and on early versions of Windows, the best known of them being autoexec.bat. Option B is wrong because .batch is not a registered extension; classic extensions were limited to three characters and the shortened form is the one that survives. Option C is wrong because .bch is not used for this purpose at all. Option D is wrong because .cth is not a standard file extension in Windows. Remember .bat along with .exe and .com as the three files that can run by themselves.

The correct answer is A, Program counter. In the 8085A microprocessor the program counter is a 16-bit register that always holds the memory address of the next instruction, or op-code, to be fetched. After each fetch it is incremented automatically, and a jump or call instruction loads a new address into it so that control moves elsewhere in the program. Two other registers of the 8085 are often confused with it. The accumulator is the 8-bit register A in which arithmetic and logic results are stored. The stack pointer is a 16-bit register holding the address of the top of the stack, used while saving return addresses and register contents. B and C are wrong for those reasons. D is wrong because instruction pointer is the name Intel's later x86 processors use for the same idea; the 8085 register is called the program counter. Exam tip: 8085 has an 8-bit accumulator and 16-bit program counter and stack pointer.

The correct answer is C, B2C. Flipkart, Alibaba and Amazon run online marketplaces whose storefronts sell goods to individual shoppers, and a business selling to a consumer is business-to-consumer, or B2C. In this model a firm lists its products on a website or an app, the customer orders and pays online, and the goods reach the home, so the shop, the salesman and the cash counter are all replaced by software. B2C is the commonest face of e-commerce and the one ordinary buyers meet every day. A is wrong because consumer-to-business, C2B, is the reverse case, where an individual offers a service or product to a firm, as a freelance designer or a blogger selling advertising space does. B is wrong because consumer-to-consumer, C2C, means one individual selling to another through a platform such as OLX. D is wrong because business-to-business, B2B, covers a firm selling to another firm, as IndiaMART does. Exam tip: Amazon and Flipkart are B2C, OLX is C2C and IndiaMART is B2B.

The correct answer is D, Java. Java is an object-oriented programming language, so it is the right pick for Preet. It was created by James Gosling at Sun Microsystems and released in 1995; every piece of code sits inside a class, and the language is built on the four pillars of object orientation — encapsulation, inheritance, polymorphism and abstraction. Java source is compiled into bytecode that any Java Virtual Machine can run, which is why it is described as write once, run anywhere. Option B is wrong because Pascal, written by Niklaus Wirth in 1970 for teaching, is a structured procedural language; only the later Object Pascal added classes. Option A is wrong for the same reason, since it offers Pascal as an equal choice. Option C is wrong because BASIC, made by Kemeny and Kurtz in 1964, is a simple procedural language for beginners. Exam tip: C++, Java, Python, C# and Smalltalk are object-oriented, while C, Pascal, FORTRAN, COBOL and BASIC are procedural.

The correct answer is C, DCL. The Data Control Language governs who may do what inside the database: GRANT gives a user a privilege such as the right to read or to update a table, and REVOKE withdraws a privilege already given. Option A is wrong because the Data Definition Language changes the structure of database objects through CREATE, ALTER, DROP and TRUNCATE. Option B is wrong because the Data Manipulation Language works on the rows themselves through INSERT, UPDATE, DELETE and SELECT. Option D is wrong because the Transaction Control Language manages a transaction as a unit with COMMIT to make changes permanent, ROLLBACK to undo them and SAVEPOINT to mark a place to roll back to. Fix the four groups by their purpose: structure, data, rights and transactions.

The correct answer is D, the operating system will return an error indicating that the directory is not empty. The plain remove-directory command is built to delete an empty folder only. In Windows it is rmdir, also written rd, and in Linux it is rmdir; both stop with a message such as "The directory is not empty" when anything is still inside. To remove a folder along with everything in it you have to ask for it: rmdir /s in Windows or rm -r in Linux, which walks through the tree, deletes the contents and then the folder. This guard exists so that a single short command cannot wipe out a large tree by mistake. Option A is wrong because nothing inside is touched without the recursive switch. Option B is wrong because a file system cannot leave files with no parent folder; the entries go together or not at all. Option C is wrong because the plain command does not ask item by item, which is what an interactive option like rm -i does. Exam tip: rmdir empties only, rm -r for the whole tree.

The correct answer is C, Dennis Ritchie. He created C at Bell Laboratories in the early 1970s and used it to rewrite the UNIX operating system, which is why C is called the mother of system programming languages and still underlies most operating systems. Option A is wrong because James Gosling developed Java at Sun Microsystems and released it in 1995, having first named it Oak. Option B is wrong because Bjarne Stroustrup extended C with classes and objects and named the result C++, so he is the creator of C++ and not of C. Option D is wrong because Guido van Rossum created Python and released the first version in 1991. Examiners set this as a match-the-pair question with all four names in one column, so learn the set together: Ritchie for C, Stroustrup for C++, Gosling for Java, van Rossum for Python, Backus for FORTRAN and Wirth for Pascal.

The correct answer is C, Shift + Enter. A manual line break, also called a soft return, moves the text to the next line while keeping it inside the same paragraph, so the spacing before and after the paragraph and the list numbering are not disturbed. It is the right way to break an address or a line of verse. Option A is wrong because Ctrl + Enter inserts a page break and throws the text on to a new page, which is a much bigger jump than a line break. Option B is wrong because Alt + Enter has no line break function in MS Word, although in MS Excel it does start a new line inside a cell, which is where the confusion comes from. Option D is wrong because Space + Enter is not a recognised key combination at all.

The correct answer is A, Ability to operate 24/7. An online store is a website or an app and not a shop with shutters, so it can take orders at any hour of any day, and that round-the-clock selling is one of the clear gains of e-commerce. The other gains follow from the same fact: a seller reaches buyers anywhere in the country without opening branches, keeps costs down because no showroom or large sales staff is needed, and can study a customer's past orders to suggest goods that suit them. Payment is made by card, net banking or UPI, and the order can be tracked until delivery. B is wrong because e-commerce widens reach instead of limiting it, carrying a small seller to a national market. C is wrong because online sellers personalise the experience closely, using browsing and purchase history to recommend products. D is wrong because operational costs usually fall, since rent, electricity and counter staff are saved. Exam tip: the gains of e-commerce are round-the-clock service, wider reach, lower costs and personalised offers.

The correct answer is D, compile a java program. The command javac is the Java compiler: it takes a source file with the extension .java, checks its grammar and converts it into a class file containing bytecode, the intermediate code that any Java Virtual Machine can run. Option A is wrong because a compiled program is executed by the separate command java, which loads the class file into the virtual machine and starts it. Option B is wrong because debugging is done with a tool such as jdb or the debugger built into a development environment, not with javac, which only reports errors of grammar. Option C is wrong because interpretation of the bytecode is the work of the Java Virtual Machine at the time the program runs; javac finishes its work before that. Remember the two-step chain that makes Java platform independent: javac produces bytecode, and the virtual machine on each computer runs that bytecode.